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?"
from a while ago
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=32256&cid=348
As a senior in high school and one of three student administrators in my 2000+ student high school, I have seen (and helped) with many issues such as this. However, you are not going to be able to resolve this problem with technology only, there needs to be other policies in place.
Any actions you choose to take or network policies you implement will be very unpopular. Almost daily I get complaints from people who wonder why their 2 gigs of ISOs were deleted from their network drive, or why they can't download mp3s at school. It usually takes a week for someone to figure out a way around new policies or some alternative way to download mp3s or whatnot.
However, we do have an AUP that everyone must sign that states these activities will not be allowed and will result in disciplinary action. Unfortunatley, they are rarely enforced and as such people get away with just about anything.
After three years of helping resolve these issues and spending hours trying to limit network traffic to what it should be used for, we have adopted a new policy that I am very dissappointed in. Our computers previously all had their own public IP address, but we are now switching every computer to a private address. Not because we have run out of IPs, but for more control. The only network traffic allowed now is internal traffic, and the ONLY way out is through a private http proxy.
This means I can no longer telnet into my linux server at home, I can no longer download my computer science homework from my home computer... you get the idea.
So, I urge you to seek support from the district's administration, implement an AUP, make sure the consequences for violating it are clear and strictly enforce those. Once someone loses their account and computer access for a month, they will think twice before downloading that VCD at school again.
there is your answer, written by your own fingers