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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?"
There is already legal precedent that P2P file sharing technology in itself is indeed legal. The Federal Appeals court that ruled was talking about networks like Morpheus and Grokster, but I would think the precedent set also applies to Bittorrent.
Here's a quote from a news story back in August:
"History has shown that time and market forces often provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology be a player piano, a copier, a tape recorder, a video recorder, a personal computer, a karaoke machine, or an MP3 player," Thomas wrote. "Thus, it is prudent for courts to exercise caution before restructuring liability theories for the purpose of addressing specific market abuses, despite their apparent present magnitude."
Still, it's probably worth a polite note to the network administrator to request "clarification". State your case concisely (they're usually busy) and politely, and you may get lucky.
Check out my eclectic infosec blog at InfoSecPotpou
Try IRC. My college started throtling BT to hell, but we tried IRC and they weren't blocking it. It is a possiblity to try.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Unfortunately the university network is a private network, and they can set nearly any policy they like. If that policy is that no applications that have explicitly been ruled legal are allowed, they can do that.
In my opinion the best you can do is to to publicise the fact in your school and/or community papers. It might help if you got it in writing that the school has a policy of banning all new applications till courts rule that they are legal. It ought to warn prospective students that far from encouraging creativity, the school has a policy of stifling it, and they ought to stay away.
Mandrake Linux uses BitTorrent as it's main method for downloading for Mandrake Club members. To quote them directly from http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/club/ "Early and privileged access is provided, before public release, to ISO images of the latest Mandrakelinux, using the fast BitTorrent technology." However I sould strongly suggest being able to substantiate the legal use before you start a discussion with your University.
- Paul
Many univeristies have an Ombudsman, whose job it is to talk advocate for those trapped in meaningless rules which do not or should not apply.
While not the most popular approach among Slashdoters, I highly recommend talking with your student government. Having served in one for way to long, I can tell you that most of them are just waiting for the perfect issue to come by to fight the Administration on. Network censorship is an easy issue to understand and they are obviously overreaching in their interpretations of "the Law."
The other important question is whether this is a state or private school. One poster said you had no recourse because it was "their network"... but such is not the case is if this is a state school. There may be certain laws that protect fair access. Again your student government can be a valuable source of information in this area.
-Sean
Only 120 characters... who can summarize their entire world understanding in 120 characters?!
I think he means incoming port 80
Indeed. And I'll add, "their network, their rules".
But it can be challenged. Are you paying for net access? Is it included in the cost of whatever it is they charge you for your education?
Read their TOS. Find legal precedent where it says that p2p is not illegal. Collect signatures. Petition, campaign, etc.
Sounds like too much work? If you are not up to it then I advise you to get another ISP (and read the TOS before you sign).
If you decide to "walk around" their filters (tunneling, etc), don't complain later on if they somehow bust you. If you decide to simply ignore their warning and BT files anyway, notify them of your reasons for this. In writing. This way you get an air of legitimacy.
WARNING: The above is not legal advice and I'm not a lawyer. Talk to a lawyer and be prepared to walk into whatever situation you choose with your eyes wide open. You might not be doing anything illegal, but that's never stopped anybody from suing anyway.
No sig
This slashdot post showed some sites using BitTorrent legally e.g. CommonBits, LegalTorrents et al.
IAAL, so...
First, it was written so it would be libel.
Not necessarily... and not necessarily relevant. The only differences between libel and slander are the potential for damages and the standard of proof required.
But libel doesn't necessarily have to be written. Nor does it being written automatically make it libel. It was in a letter personally sent to the plaintiff. So, it's not disseminated in such a way that it would have a potential to be particularly damaging to the plaintiff. So I don't see a libel claim here.
Second, it was not published, only sent to the student, so it wouldn't even be libel.
All publication requires is that it be shown to one other person... that whoever wrote the letter showed it to someone else.
And third, it's their network so they can disallow whatever they want.
If it is a state-run school, the First Amendment applies and they cannot make content-based restrictions on speech. Whether that applies to this situation is arguable. But it is certainly not as clear as you make it out to be.
Parent is not a troll. This is only done in some regions though. That is why not all users are affected. Just browse their forum at Broadband reports to confirm it yourself.
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/shaw
Chances are, the college has some form of student union, and student unions typically have access to legal counsel for when students get in trouble. I think this would qualify.
Sometime around November 2004 Shaw started to packet shape bittorrent in Vancouver. I'm not familiar with the technical specifics, but I can tell you that my bittorrent uploads dropped to under 5K/sec (and as such my downloads died as well).
This only affects motorola modems. Since then I have switched to a terayon modem and I can again upload at 40-50K/sec (although I think a lot of people did this as my connection sometimes gets very slow during peak times).
I've heard that they have since introduced packet shaping in the rest of the Country but I'm not 100% certain of this.
Here are a couple sources: Shaw Throttling Bit Torrent? and Shaw ISP Customers Experience BitTorrent Slowdown
Explain to them that they are a bunch of clueless morons who need to educate themselves on the difference between a tool and a crime. If you need to point out a widespread legitimate use of Bittorrent technology just point them to the 1.5 million users of World of Warcraft which uses BT as its befault patch distribution method through the Blizzard supplied patch client.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
A friend of mine has written some QoS scripts that do just that:
http://www.digriz.org.uk/jdg-qos-script/
Token Bucket Packet Shaping
Users can accumulate bandwidth at a set rate, and can burst when they need to. However, if you try to hog the bandwidth, you get throttled down really fast. For normal users, they get the bandwidth they need, when they need it.
I was using IRC on an university account, and was contacted by them to stop using the service. I explained I was using the IRC for research and would remove it immediately if it was causing a problem, and received an email from the sys admin thanking me for my honesty, and telling me I could contintue using it.
Our courts will never declare P2P use legal. It's not what they do. The legal system in this country is designed around the idea that things are legal and people are innocent until laws make it illegal or you are found guilty. You are allowed to have and use bitorrent under US law. It's a first amendment right. You are not allowed to share copyrighted works however. By way of analogy it's like having a printing press. It's ok to print your own work, or works you are contracted to print by the creator, or works in the public domain: as long as you dont start printing copies of things like The Lord of The Rings (which did, in fact, happen and resulted in legal fights and too many editions wandering around). You can share free software and your own works with the tool. So you have some recourse. And you might want to investigate whatever student and academic tribunals that you have at your disposal. This is a right worth protecting. I should mention that IANAL, but I do follow this closely as I did have articles censored in my High School paper, as well as other students at that school. So this is an issue near and dear to my heart. There are things to condsider... Is this a private or state run school? That may make a difference if this ever has to go to court. Usually the courts have taken the position that the school is publisher in student censorship cases and so has a right to edit the content of what they publish. So they might have the final right to say no to all P2P sharing on their network as it is "their" bandwidth. However, you have not committed a crime, right? And you might want to be careful on that count, it would be embarrassing to go before a student/faculty review board and claim you only use it for legit purposes...and then have them show that you spent 2 weeks downlaoding the entire series of Porky's movies. So, be careful. Or build your arguments carefully. You might want to contact the EFF or the ACLU, they both deal with this kind of thing. Finally, I expect your best course of action is to try to protect your rights at the academic level. Get an academic review board together and present your case that the tool and the file quoted are not illegal, and show the license that allows you to share the file. Allow the IT deparment to make their case that they have limited bandwidth and dont have time to determine which files are legal and which are not. Demonstrate that you are a responsible citizen, not a wily and witless media bandit and try to paint the IT dept's policy as draconian and possibly a violation of civil rights. Let the students and faculty decide and they will set policy for the school. Then you will know what kind of school you really go to. Or...host your files off-campus. ---Gorehog
I just read over every word of the IT license at the university where I work (which I'd take to be a pretty standard IT license), and nothing in there would allow them to do what happened to this student, and certainly is not a situation where one can "remove access to whatever they want whenever they want". The license requires the university to have a justification; there are a number of potential justifications, but none of them are "because we feel like it".
Given my university's license, about the closest argument that they could make would be "excessive personal use", but even that falls pretty flat on its face, given the letter that the student was sent and the actions that they were taking (downloading a software update) that led to the ban. They certainly weren't doing anything that would fall under violation of local, state, or federal laws; they weren't attempting to disrupt the network; they weren't attempting to invade anyone's privacy; etc. The student didn't fall under any category listed.
"It felt almost as good as stealing cars from grandma." -- Margaret Thatcher, probably.
Last I checked, "IT" wasn't a major.
My alma mater offers a Ph.D. in Information Technology
http://ite.gmu.edu/PhDprogr/main.html
Student legal services often exclude claims against the university/college from their services, since the lawyers may be technically employees of the school.
Students and faculty need to let their IT departments know what they legitimate purposes they have for using P2P applications.
At Oregon State University, we ran into a huge problem with P2P sharing, in terms of bandwidth. One fall when the students came back, we were "in the straights" for several days - we were saturating our link to the commodotity Internet.
We discussed not allowing P2P on campus, but we learned from a few folks who were using it for legitimate research sharing purposes, and decided intead to use a packet-shaper and set a lower priority on P2P traffic. Additionally, our Housing group enforces pretty strict bandwidth limits (http://oregonstate.edu/resnet/policies.php). So far, this approach has been working great for us.
We do, of course, receive DMCA complaints on a regular basis (about 1-2/week for a University with 18,000 students - not bad, I think). When we get these complaints, we contact the person who owns the machine or webpage, find out if the file was really copywritten material, and make them take it down. Occassionally, we have gotten false reports from RIAA or MPAA, so we try not to assume that the files are being illegally shared.
P2P is banned outright at my government owned institute. First of all, the IT department has an application server set up to detect P2P applications based on the traffic, regardless of what port they are using. Here is why it's banned:- (1) It's a security risk. Most of the time people using P2P applications find themselves targets of port scans and other hack attempts. We really don't need this. (2) The piracy issue. Sure, you can argue for downloading Linux ISOs over BitTorrent, but let's be real here. When you already have some AMAZING bandwidth, downloading ISOs (And Debian as jigdo files) is quick by FTP or HTTP alone. There's nothing research related that can only be found on BitTorrent. Plus, allowing people to host illegal content becomes a liability for the IT department, and we have enough work to deal with. (3) The network issue. It hammers the network unneccessarily, and if allowed, it would create a chicken and egg situation for the IT department. As soon as we do an upgrade of the network, more people would use P2P to use up the bandwidth - requiring another upgrade, which more people would then max out. It's too expensive to keep doing this, we already have enough switches that need replacing.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
How can self-signed certs be illegal? Generating a random prime number pair and then encrypting it with another one is illegal? What?
My other car is first.
I'm not a lawyer.
.that EULA you clicked through? Courts usually say they're not worth the paper they're printed. . .whatever.
Contracts which a party isn't expected to read isn't considered to be enforcible. Basically, contracts are about mutual agreement, and if a party is expected to "sign or walk", with no real ability to bargain, then a court won't uphold it. (If you need the network connection, you might be able to get a duress argument in there as well). These contracts are called contracts of adhesino, and courts will refuse to enforce them. So, yeah. .
So why do they roll out such contracts anyway? 1) It's intimidating, and it works on most non-lawyers, who won't know enough to get legal advice from a lawyer. 2) Businesses ARE usually expected to read contracts 3) Plaintiffs can't make the argument "Well, they never TOLD me that I couldn't use P2P!" They did. Plaintiffs just didn't read it.
To conclude, your security policy is probably legally worthless, under the Common Law. It's also not likely that anyone is going to challenge it.
I am a lawyer, and the first question that comes to my mind is whether your school is a public or private institution. If public, you may have a claim for a violation of your First Amendment rights. You have freedom of speech, and while using Bittorrent for infringement would not be considered protected speech, using it for lawful communications certainly is. One of the briefs filed in the Grokster case (by Video Software Dealers Assocaition) makes the point that the Firt Amendment protects the use of P2P technology for lawful communications. As some have noted, schools may restrict uses based on consumption (bandwidth issues), but to suppress a particular method of commuincation because they don't like it has traditionally been frowned upon.
Aire Libre
The Halo fansite Halo.Bungie.Org has recently been using BitTorrent more and more often to distribute Halo videos to the community. Since the number of people downloading these vids has increased dramatically, BitTorrent has become necessary. There are plenty of legal applications for BitTorrent, and in this case, one that is necessary. The beauty of BitTorrent is (as i'm sure everyone here already knows) that the more people are downloading a file, the faster the download speeds are for everyone.
10100111001
At the university of Helsinki (Where Linux was born) we have a similar policy. I asked one of the admins about the issue with bittorrent clients. The response was simply that because the university has an insane amount of bandwidth, BT tends to transmit at full speed, to the point that other traffic actually suffers noticeably.
The "illegal" part is because enough people have used those to distribute unauthorized copyrighted material that the network disruption can be directly connected to them.
It is a major issue, because the university has to pay for the bandwidth it uses, and p2p clients use as much bandwidth as they get.
The admin mentioned that prioritizing them down does not work, as different clients popping up and changing ports all the time causes too much work. Because they don't serve much purpose to studies, it was decided that it is impossible to separate the legal from illegal uses with existing resources, and it is not feasible to pay for the extra bandwidth.
Here is a site (in finnish) explaining the effect of p2p apps on university bandwidth use, with graphs
You can even be given permission and not have the right to do so, although the only example of that I can think of is when the person you thought was the copyright owner wasn't.
Which is why DRM is so insidious. It claims to map 'copyright holder's permission' directly to 'right to make a copy', thus trying to remove centuries of American (and, hell, British) legal precedents and law that says that's not true.
And, as if that's not enough, in practice it's mapping 'permission of the person who gave the work to you' (as witnessed by public domain works distributed as ebooks with DRM that is illegal to break) to 'right to use' (as witnessed by the whole DeCSS thing).
It's really far out there, legally. 'Permission of the person who gave it to you' has never been required for a 'right to use'. (In fact, nothing has ever been required for a right to use.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?