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?"
Keep in mind that your definition of "legitimate use" may be quite different from theirs. University IT departments tend not to consider anything to be "legitimate" unless it has a valid academic application. Do you know of any academic uses for BitTorrent? Not trying to rain on your parade, but "I need it to download X" probably won't cut much ice.
Bandwidth considerations and legal issues are very different things. You can always limit the bandwidth that's allocated for p2p application in your network. But if RIAA decides to sue the university for huge sums of money it's in for a financial burn. The cost of the legal battle in itself is enough to deter almost any institution.
Of course I agree that universities should not censor information, especially not in such unclever ways as declaring a protocol illegal. But I can understand why some universities have to kneel before the commerical powers that be.
The power of Christ compiles you!
I did indeed send a reply back citing several legitimate uses (linux ISOs, legal large multimedia etc...). After which, I agreed to suspend my BitTorrent usage temporarily until the issue was resolved. However, the reply I received seemed less than understanding. Aside from being thanked for discontinuing my use of BT, I was told that what I was doing was potentially dagerous. To quote part of the e-mail: "I think the issue is potentially dangerous for you and the university. Thanks for suspending BitTorrent."
Which is why I bring the question to the community. Obviously using BT for legit purposes is not anymore dangerous than, say, browsing the web.
Why is that any more absurd than blocking something such as BitTorrent, especially as BitTorrent's legitimate applications are increasing?
Color me naive, but I never realized BitTorrent had a following of pirates until recently. I always saw it billed as a way to grab large files (e.g. Linux ISOs) in a lot less time than HTTP or FTP transfers. In fact that is the only thing I ever use it for. To see organizations ban or restrict it pisses me off.
Fortunately, the content industries seem to be taking a halfway correct approach: find people violating copyright using a technology, and prosecute those people. Even if BitTorrent gets a bad reputation, there are enough of us using it legitimately that 1) we won't go to jail and 2) BitTorrent will still have a legitimate user base and stay alive (thank you, OSS!).
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
working in the IT department at a MAJOR U.S. college has taught me a few things. One of them is: you never know what you agreed to. We have a security policy that is roughly 50 pages, and much like EULAs, wether you read it or not, you agree to its terms by using said system. (especially since our school has a user id/password process to get on the networks, and a special housing policy that must be signed.) and basicly in there it says that they can remove access to whatever they want whenever they want, and they can tell you want you cant and cant do at any time. now considering this is outlined in the policy you are agreeing to, i think all other legal precidence goes away. If the school pays the bills and offers the service free, and ESPECIALLY if they have you sign something acknowledging what they can/cant do, they can close anything they want and youre basicly shit out of luck. IANAL. my 2 cents.