Slashdot Mirror
BitTorrent Inherently Illegal?
Nohbdy001 asks: "Today I received a letter from my university's network administration advising me that my network access would be terminated due to 'illegal P2P activity.' The P2P activity that the e-mail cited was BitTorrent and the file being transferred was an update to the Azureus BitTorrent client. The letter stated, 'Until the courts decide that student P2P activity is permitted we will continue to block this activity on our network,' implying that BitTorrent is inherently illegal. It seems such misunderstandings are common, but it is particularly frustrating when coming from people in the IT field. How can a student respond to such an accusation in order to defend the validity of BitTorrent and continue to benefit from its legitimate uses?"
You won't win. They are covering their collective asses.
Was the bit torrent client the only file you ever transferred ? The university did not shut you down just because of this one file. I wouldn't be taking a big chance if I guessed that you had music and/or movie files also being transferred on your bit torrent connection at other times. That would be copyright infringement, and that's illegal.
(let the flames begin...)
I block BitTorrent for all my lab machines on campus.
We spent a few months monitoring torrent traffic to have a look at what exactly it was being used for.
Less than 0.5% of traffic involved legal and/or appropriate downloads.
I'm not particularly happy about having to do this, but the reality is that torrents are almost entirely used for dodgy downloads.
We have signs up about it, if students have something they wish to download that is only available via torrent, the computing staff will do it for them.
i don't read slashdot anymore.
Your country has been co-opted by a ruling class that exerts their power by threats, intimidation, and influence peddeling. There seems to be a pseudo-monarchy in control. I don't mean the government, they are just pawns in the game.
When will this end?
I seem to recall that you guys had a "tea party" once that started a significant change.
Who shall we invite for tea this time?
If I downloaded a couple of ditties by Beethoven, was I cutting into the bandwidth of students browsing the Web, no doubt purely for academic purposes?
Making sweeping statements like this without thought leads to poor policies.
And making arguments based on the vast exception rather than rule leads to lost debates.