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RIAA Cracks Down on Internet2 File Sharing
Daverd writes "Hundreds of students at 18 universities nation-wide have had lawsuits filed against them by the RIAA for filesharing over Internet2." The official RIAA Press Release and commentary at MSNBC is also available. From the article: "i2Hub has been seen as a safe haven, and what we wanted to do was puncture that misconception," said Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA. "This has been a subversion of the research purposes for which Internet2 was developed."
Who didn't see it coming? It was bound to happen.
You just cant keep 100 TB of files "hidden" for all that long. Considering all the press it got last year, I'm surprised it has even lasted even this long.
Also, don't forget our friends in the MPAA. In a short post by the author of the news.com.com article: "According to the RIAA, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) will be announcing similar action later today."
In case you don't read the article, here are the universities in question: Boston University, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Drexel University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michigan State University, New York University, Ohio State University, Princeton University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology, University of California at Berkeley, University of California at San Diego, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, University of Pittsburgh and the University of Southern California.
Go RIT!
There is also an official press release from the people at i2hub, here: http://press.i2hub.com/i2hubpressrelease-4122005.p df.
i2hub doesn't host any files centrally, nor do they keep any indexes of files on the network, so they should be fine. P2P lives on another day.
About Internet2
Fundamentally, it's just like the JANET network here in the UK -- it is a network backbone that links educational establishments to each other and the Internet.
(I'd say that calling the US academic network "Internet2" is misleading -- it's just another network, albeit a fast one.)
Additionally, most I2 sites prefer to use I2 where possible because it generally doesn't cost them anything to send bits over it. Whereas commodity bandwidth costs money.
noah
Great. Let us know when they stop going after the technology.
Here is an article about the issue that was published in yesterday's edition of The Tartan, the student newspaper of Carnegie Mellon, one of the universities targeted by the RIAA. There was also an editorial written about the issue. (Note: The Tartan's website cannot be rendered in Internet Explorer. Please use a standards-compliant web browser.)
Also, below is the full text of an email that was sent to all students on April 4 from Carnegie Mellon's Chief Information Officer Joel Smith.
-------- Original Message -------- To: The Carnegie Mellon Community
From: Joel Smith, Chief Information Officer
Subject: Illegal use of copyrighted materials on Carnegie Mellon's network - your *personal* liability
Date: Mon, 04 Apr 2005 22:33:47 -0000
We are writing to remind the entire campus community of the University's commitment to the protection of intellectual property and copyrighted material. When it comes to illegal copying of digital materials - whether music, video, text, or pictures - the University imposes its own penalties (disciplinary action, loss of network connectivity) on anyone who is found to be using Carnegie Mellon's network for such purposes.
Moreover, the trade organizations that are charged with protecting copyrighted materials, e.g. the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), are aggressively searching for copyright violators on the Internet and *will take independent legal action against such violators.* Peer to peer file sharing activity using the Carnegie Mellon network is accessible to their monitoring. Past actions by these industry associations have resulted in substantial monetary penalties imposed on the individuals involved. See:
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2003/05/ 02/news/8154.shtml
In fact, according to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, penalties can range from $750 to $150,000 per song if songs are the items being distributed illegally.
Please be aware that the target of these actions is not the University, but rather the individuals engaged in the violations. As an Internet service provider, following the results of court rulings last year, the University is obliged to respond to subpoenas from organizations like the RIAA and the MPAA requesting the names of individuals who operate computers illegally sharing copyrighted materials. Do not be misled by the fact that Verizon, as an Internet service provider, won its case for not providing user names in response to certain kinds of "John Doe" subpoenas. The ruling allows the RIAA and the MPAA to discover the identities of copyright violators from Internet service providers (including universities) as long as they follow certain legal procedures.
Simply put, if you are engaged in illegal use of copyrighted materials (usually done by peer-to-peer file sharing using programs like Kazza, LimeWire, BitTorrent, and others) and the University receives a proper subpoena asking for the name of the person who registered the computer being used for such purposes on the Carnegie Mellon network, we are legally obligated to supply that name. The result may well be that the RIAA or MPAA will take legal action against *you*. There is nothing the University can do to shield you from such action.
Since your identity on the network is based on the match between your name an the IP address and *MAC* or *hardware* address of your computer, it is a very good idea to be sure that all and only the computers you physically control are registered to you. You can check the list of computers you have registered to your name using Computing Services' NetReg system. Go to http://netreg.net.cmu.edu, click on the Enter button at
| Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
Have a look at the Internet 2's home page. They're collaborating with the RIAA on ths one.
-kidlinux.
What crime? Having files be named after popular songs/artists? That's not a crime, as far as I know.
I'll point out that the *AA organizations are not the "authorities", even if they like to think they are.
Then you do what everyone else did - block the relevant protocol. Or start easier, by blocking MAC addresses, etc. It's an internal matter, as the Unis are suppose to handle administration of i2 themselves and that includes bandwidth usage.
Of course, this is the real world, and things do not work as intended more often than not. But this still does not justify passing info over to RIAA. In fact, looking at your statement:
lumping the two together looks fishy. Going to the school's attorneys would be normal procedure in such a case (suspected law breaking) while going to RIAA's ones can expose the school to legal action without giving it a chance to correct the problem. I expect normal procedure for this kind of 'volunteering info' would be at the least to have the person fired.
First off, the PeerGuardian concept assumes that all enemy attacks are going to come from known enemy IP space. This is a dangerous and rather dumb assumption; nothing says that the RIAA or BayTSP et al are scanning/probing P2P networks from their own IP space. They might not be popular, but most of these organizations are full of lawyers and other relatively smart people. They do have at least half a clue.
It's long been rumored that some of these organizations recruit a) employees to run P2P crawlers at home and b) students to run P2P crawlers on campus. The fact that they've somehow obtained access to Internet2 makes the idea that they're paying students to run P2P crawlers all the more likely. My guess is that running P2P spidering software on behalf of RIAA might be part of some silent settlements that we aren't hearing about. "We caught you sharing files you're not allowed to. Either we sue you, you pay us $2000 and we go away, or you run this nice little program and promise not to tell anyone..."
So, PeerGuardian blocks a few connections from "known" RIAA IP space (nevermind that many of the blocks are a bit overzealous and will generate false positives). The user is lulled into a false sense of security - hey, it's working! Connections from those evil bastards are being stopped! I'm safe!!
But are you sure that the connection from a Comcast cablemodem isn't really an RIAA lawyer's home PC? How do you know what application is really connecting to you from that rice.edu address?
Secondly, from what I understand of the C&D letters being sent to ISPs, and perhaps even some of the lawsuits being filed, often times no connection was involved at all. The P2P spidering software does a search for "Britney Spears MP3," parses the results, and builds a list of IP/Date/Filename. They don't actually try to connect to your computer and download the file, otherwise Professor Usher would never have been threatened, admins would not be getting C&D letters regarding IPs which have never been lit up, etc.
PeerGuardian is a nice idea. It apparently makes a lot of people feel better. And it might even work if this was 1980 when everyone on the internet was exactly who they said they were.
Don't go crying to the PeerGuardian authors when you get caught anyway.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.