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RIAA Targets LAN Filesharing at Universities
segphault writes "The RIAA has sent letters to 40 university presidents in 25 separate states informing them that students are engaging in filesharing on their campuses using the local network. Apparently, the RIAA wants to get universities to use filtering software on their networks to detect student filesharing. The RIAA did not disclose the methodology they used to determine that filesharing is occuring on those local networks, but it probably didn't involve asking permission. The article goes on to predict that the RIAA will eventually try to get the government to require use of anti-filesharing filtering technologies at universities."
1. Emule - This is one of the best we found out there. Hint (Search for server.met on google to update your server list)
2. Bearshare - Nice Gnutella client, lots of good hits
3. Limewire - Another Gnutella client. It even works on the Mac!
4. Shareaza - A beautiful Gnutella client with no spyware.
5. BitTorrent - Perfect for downloading movies, or that latest linux distro
6. KaZaa - Old favorite. Oh yea - Aussie users, you can't download - Yea Right!
7. Azureus - BitTorrent client that works on Mac, Linux, and Windows 8. Morpheus - Wow. They are still around? Wha happened!
9. Gnucleus - Open source Gnutella for you freeloading open source hippies out there - Yea I am talking about you
10. Napster - Ah, just put this one here to see if you are still reading, and I guess for shits and grins too
So there you have it folks. These are slim pickings. Get um while they still work!
but it probably didn't involve asking permission
Despite the implications of this statement, what it probably really involves is paying off a student or two to sniff out and inform on filesharing activity, either by running RIAA apps or just manual searching. It wouldn't be the first time they've used this method.
Really, what are they going to do to enforce this? It's not as if they have a way to snoop on lan traffic, and if they did it would be illegal. I know that for one, my university has a "don't know, don't want to know" attitude about filesharing, so long as you keep the traffic below about 1.5GB per day. I really don't think they have the muscle to do anything about lan sharing.
And it's really no big secret if you just ask either. Having just finished school, probably almost all of the filesharing is in copyrighted material which they have no right to "share". Therefore it is illegal and should be stopped. It was disgusting to me how much people were trading movies, games, and music which didn't belong.
The schools probably will realize they could be liable if they don't try to put a stop it or slow it down. I like how the article and slashdot makes no mention of the copyrighted nature of the material, as if everybody is just sharing Linux distributions. At least be honest about this, guys.
I have more than one computer on my home network and I share music between all of them. Are they going to get me too? What is the law regarding file sharing on a private network? What if my girl friend copies my music from my laptop? Is that piracy?
fuvoo: watch something
So are the universities (and all networks, by extension) supposed to sniff every packet and look for "copyrighted material" so it can take whatever action the industry think is "appropriate"?
Perhaps every car should also have a sensor to detect speeding and automatically cut the gas?
Fuck the music industry. Their ever more desperate measures only mean they are painfully aware of how irrelevant they are about to become.
It looks like they will soon send messages to parents informing them that their kids are engaging in filesharing amongst themselves at their homes using the home network.
I don't remember, maybe it was Einstein who said the definition of insanity was to repeatedly do something and expect a different result. Is the RIAA insane?
This is cutting their (RIAA/Entertainment industry) future profits off at the source on a number of levels.
Also, it is so problematic to try and institute filtering in an academic arena. There are probably any number of legitimate ways and reasons to see file sharing on a college campus that would not be legal outside. This will force universities to layer artificial distribution mechanisms they otherwise could have handled with firewall policies. (All this at an added expense to universities, and eventually to the cost of an education.)
So, once again the music industry goes to the "we don't know for sure, but to be safe we're going to assume you're a crook" mentality. The RIAA needs to listen to clue.mp3.
That won't work very well.
If I can get onto the same network as 10 of my buddies, chances are very high that they have stuff I want to steal.
There's no way you're going to lock down to layer 7 filtering (looking at the program data itself, very intensive to comute) at a layer 2 scope (your local IP subnet, or close enough). So you either block SMB ports (file sharing altogether, the lifeblood of a computer network with actual users), or pay $$$ to filter it, poorly.
Rumor has it that if I have my laptop at the library, and so do some other people, that we can magically create a network between us that has no juristiction by the University. Or maybe they *do*, but they have no idea about it.
Any way it gets sliced up, the dollars can't keep up with the ways to get around it.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
and demand that Congress pass a law requiring every person with a social security number to purchase 5 DRM loaded cd's per month, and staple their receipts on form 1040 come April 15th. After all, the government requires us to support the insurance companies by purchasing auto insurance. Why not entertainment too? I mean, EVERYBODY is guilty of pirating music anyway, right?
This isn't anything new. The RIAA has been policing campus network traffic. USC's campus DC++ hub was busted by the RIAA after the RIAA came in and convinced the University to allow them access.
All the RIAA has to do is politely ask (more like......we will hold you harmless if we are given access to investigate) and the Universities usually will bow in and allow access to the campus network.
As for stopping campus filesharing, it's pretty hard to stop as long as it stays within the borders. And moreover, with students in such close physical contact, it's fairly easy to set up rogue networks, or even just swap burned DVDs/memory sticks.
When interviewed, the majority of congressmen said point blank that person to person "dormroom" sharing of music was fair use and in no way objectionable.
.. "in the news today the RIAA demanded that automakers comply with new requirements to prevent passers by and non-drivers from "illeagally hearing" music from car stereos which "by law" is only entitled to the owner/operator of the vehicle alone."
Further, the DMCA's notice and takedown only applies to the internet, not local area networks.
Any university complying with these bs "complaints" has to have the stupidest administration ever, and any claims made by the RIAA are now utterly specious.
What next.. "illegal sharing through car radios"?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
The RIAA will be going after Microsoft for allowing people to share files on their computer over a "network neighborhood". After which, hard drive manufactures will be sent letters informing them that their products are used in the distribution of copyrighted material and must include anti-file sharing technologies. Tesla will be woken from the grave and bitch-smacked for his accomplishments in electro-magnetism, and finally they will sue God for giving humans ears in which they can listen to stolen songs.
Wow, that slope was slippery...
Am I wrong to think that a program like WASTE (http://waste.sourceforge.net) is the easy fix if they started sniffing the local traffic?
shhhh!
The first rule of usenet is that you do not talk about usenet!
My biggest fear is that services like easynews are going to bring a lot of heat down on my file sharing garden of eden.
Don't buy RIAA member CDs, make music mixes for friends and support the indie scene. If someone chides you about filesharing, tell them to get stuffed.
http://www.downhillbattle.org/ http://www.eff.org/ http://www.riaaradar.com/
when they outlaw loudly distributing music over the atmospheric network. Thus I will finally be able to get some sleep...
1: gain unauthotized access to the network: a crime
or
2: pay off students, who are not experts, or potentialy worse, students with know-how and malis to collect the data, so how can they prove that the data is valid, and not tamperd with?
Any lawyers in the house? Care to give it a shot?
About two weeks ago the direct connect hub at the university of texas was shut down due to outside pressure from the **aa. Our ITS department already imposed strict bandwidth restrictions on amount of bandwidth used (4gb-12gb a week with more bandwidth costing more money). We used the hub to share files (primarily new tv shows) so everyone could get what they wanted without runnign out of bandwidth. Before the letters, ITS looked the other way because the hub accually saved them money on bandwidth. The owner of the hub had his internet revoked and was orderd to shut down the hub a facebook group and serve 40 hours of community service in exchange for not turning his name over to the copyright holders for prosecution.
In the UK, almost every university has at least one DC++ hub that a large portion of the student body knows about and uses. Many have customised installers that make it easy for lay people to get starting filesharing and, with computers so ubiquitous on campus, almost anyone has the knowledge to get involved.
The thing is, these massively efficient networks that often contain dozens of TiBs of data would not be nearly as widespread as they are if it weren't for unwritten university policies. If the university isn't on JANET, external bandwidth is expensive. If it is, bandwidth isn't metered as such, but it's in the institutions' interests to not rinse their external traffic too much especially with high upload rates favoured by P2P protocols such as Bittorrent. As such, students using massive amounts of external P2P bandwidth are quickly clamped down upon while they are simultaneously reminded that the existing LAN costs sweet fuck all. What's more, untold masses of viruses come in from kids searching for warez ftp sites or loading up KaZaA.
It doesn't take too long for the computer scientists to put two and two together and test the waters with a DC++ hub either within the university or outside. As long as users do not saturate the university network and hence impinge upon academic use, it's a win-win situation. College kids get the new Tool album for free without getting busted and the university avoids angry letters from the xxAA while seeing its bandwidth bills fall. As long as students don't make it the university's problem, they're happy to ignore it.
It's hard to see how the RIAA can achieve anything by this. After all, they are private networks and no university's computer office is going to give them access to their network if they have any sense. The kids will be forced back to torrents and such. As long as those running hubs are intelligent enough to delete logs and people are prepared to migrate to something like WASTE, the RIAA's efforts are futile.
Turkeyphant
Gonzales wants to track users on the Internet for the sake of "fighting porn". This in of itself is scary because it's not difficult to imagine the potential for abuse. Now the RIAA wants to monitor college networks for "file sharing". This could easily be manipulated to filter out certain ideas and beliefs as a means to suppress freedom of speech. It could also be used to target students for their beliefs.
First of all, why is the RIAA monitoring colleges' LANs? Is that even legal? Secondly, I fileshare on my LAN all the time. The sharing of my clients' orders and bills is necessary to the survival of my business. Don't flame me for asking this because I honestly don't know the answer: does the RIAA have any authority or legal right to be monitoring students and their actions on private college's LANs? Where does the Recording Industry Association of America get off thinking that they have any authority over the sharing on local networks?
It may take a while, but eventually they're going to run that tap dry. Being a fruitless-effort hobbyist myself, I'll try to hasten the day by pissing and moaning at my elected officials. Hey, someone has to, what with all the actual grown-up problems sitting on the back burner while public servants pour ever more time, money & former constitutional rights into legislating a perfect digital Fort Knox for the entertainment industry.
Pi Ran Out
Most of the time when I read the modded up comments below the summaries, someone has already said everything worth saying... but for this paticular article it seems like even a lot of the the +5 comments are, well, crap.
I am a student at the University of Texas. One week ago our DC++ hub was shut down. This was unexpected and unprecedented. A few months earlier the school news paper even interviewed people with ITS who basically said they could care less about the hub. After the university received some type of a cease and desist letter, our school's ITS contacted the primary HUB admin, and long story short within less than 24 hours the hub had to shut down forever. Amoung other obscure sidenotes, they even ordered that the facebook group "Direct Connect Users Group" be deleted. My friends at Texas A&M have told me their hub is down right now too, similar story.
Both our colleges had hubs constantly sharing about 20TB of data, 24-7, with net download speeds of 1.5Mbps. Every TV show was on our hub within 4 hrs of airing. Adobe Acrobat 7 and Office 2007 were both readily avaialable before I could, not that I ever would of course, download them from private bittorrent trackers. The files were never corrupted, there was no risk of getting caught, and everything mainstream you could ever want was on the hub.
One huge appeal of the hub also was it's simplicity of use. 5GB share minimum was pretty much the only barrier to entry. I know friends who downloaded from DC++ who never heard of BitTorrents in their life, and for that matter, have asked me for help reinstalling windows. It was so simple and easy to use to the average non-geek that now that it has gone down people ask me what to do and give me blank looks.
So in response to every post about other alternatives to file sharing or otherwise really miss the significance of this, I think it is quite a significant win for RIAA.
When interviewed, the majority of congressmen said point blank that person to person "dormroom" sharing of music was fair use and in no way objectionable.
Sounds interesting. Link?
I really don't understand this witch-hunt against file sharing - peer-to-peer. etc. The Internet is all about moving files from A to B - http, ftp, scp, nfs, email, bittorrent...these are all just ways of moving data around.
You can illegally copy copyrighted works using almost any protocol you can imagine - so the existance of a community of people moving data around means NOTHING. Unless the **AA can show WHAT is being moved around - and that it's illegal, there is no reason to single out any one particular protocol as the cause for worry.
Even if you imagine one particular protocol is predominantly used for wrong-doing - you can't reasonably penalise the legal uses of that protocol. If you actually succeeded in shutting down one protocol - another can be invented overnight. This is simply the wrong approach to dealing with copyright violations.
Argh.
www.sjbaker.org
But perhaps a more significant file sharing program comes built into Windows. The Windows file share and samba allow people to share data between their own computers. If my university blocked samba shares I would be greatly inconvenienced. My main computer is a laptop that runs windows. It has a small hard drive, so I keep most of my files on my Linux box via a samba share. The Linux box isn't powerful enough to replace my laptop, it's just there to provide storage space. I'm not sharing my files with the world, or even a few other people on campus, so the RIAA has no right to tell me (or my university) that I can't share files between my own computers.
As much as the RIAA pisses me off, I think the pirates are largely to blame. If some people weren't always trying to get copyrighted works without paying for them, the media producers wouldn't have nearly as many excuses to bind users to certain platforms in order to use the media.
What next.. "illegal sharing through car radios"? .. "in the news today the RIAA demanded that automakers comply with new requirements to prevent passers by and non-drivers from "illeagally hearing" music from car stereos which "by law" is only entitled to the owner/operator of the vehicle alone."
Already true in Finland for Taxi drivers - when there's a passenger, either the radio is switched off or the driver (or Taxi company) pay's levys to the RIAA equivalent here.
If the RIAA wants the university to filter their network to protect their copyrights and their bottom line then they should pay the university for all of the network equipment, bandwidth, employee/consultant hours, and any other expenses necessary to conduct the filtering. The mission of any university is to provide higher education and policing the student body so that a private industry organization, which is entirely external to the mission of the university, will not suffer from potential loss of profits is NOT the responsibility of the university. The question is not whether file sharing is legal, but rather to what extent the university can be compelled to shoulder the cost of protecting the intellectual property of someone else, especially in the expensive and escalating arms race between the RIAA and the file sharers. If the university makes a good faith effort to inform students in their acceptable use policy what is and is not acceptable use and complies with reasonable and specific subpoenas (subject to reasonable charges for research, copies, and other legal expenses that any other civil plaintiff would have to pay) the I would say that they (the university) have satisfied their obligation under the law. If the RIAA et al wants more extensive monitoring then they can shell out the $100,000+ for extra servers and network monitoring gear along with the consultants to operate it all and the university employees' time (billed at least $100 per hour for interruption of normal university related duties). They cannot compel us to pay to protect THEIR property, only the government has the power to tax. Anyway, no other private business gets anywhere near the cooperation from law enforcement at the expense of the tax paying public and still they complain. The FBI should be traking down the identity thieves, terrorists, serial killers, and other really nasty criminals...not wasting their time busting copyright infringers on behalf of the entertainment industry. The RIAA should get off our campuses and they should take their craptastic "music" with them.
Strangely enough, I will say I thought about the expression when I typed it. I did a makeshift check on google...
- "could not care less" returns about 321,000 Results
- "could care less" returns about 5,480,000 Results
Check the hit count yourself; there really is that big of difference in results. I merely stuck with the most common usage.Disclaimer: For anyone who did happen to think critically about what I said, I will qualify that "couldn't care less" returns about 3,270,000 Results. That was the original cliche phrase, which over time has evolved for whatever reason to omit the "not" part. The real bottom line is that both versions are almost equally used, and the average person could care less which version you pick.
They'll never stop LAN sharing. While I'm an engineering student, most people can understand Filezilla, a nice ftp client that supports SFTP. Hard drives are cheap these days, and anyone with a weeks linux experience can set up an SFTP server and share the username password. I doubt my school will bother to track down and break the encryption on it, the worst ehy would do is shut off our connection for a day as a warning, and there are enough poorly configured wireless points that losing the ethernet for a day isn't a problem.
SAILING MISHAP
There are many great examples of abuse in the civil courts, but I don't think the McDonalds coffee lawsuit is one of them.
See this.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
their congressmen and demanded that they deal with the mad dogs that are the RIAA, they'd geek in about 20 seconds. We need to speak up and put an end to this insanity.
People are speaking up, they just aren't "greasing" the wheels of justice properly. Now if every one of those 100,000 people enclosed a $50 "donation" and a pledge of $50 more when sane legislation is enacted you might actually see something done.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
In the letter that the RIAA sent to these colleges, they specified DC and Mytunes/Ourtunes. Now I have no idea how common DC hubs are at universities, but I do happen to know that iTunes pirating is very popular. How many campuses out there are absent of this form of piracy? Maybe the one without computers? The RIAA could have sent these to any campus with a listed administrative email account (Though I'm sure they went for larger campuses...)
I looked up the two devices that they reccomend. One has taken heavy flack from the EFF and is seems easy enough to defeat. The other's website hasn't been updated in years, and their 'news' lists events that vaguely occur with piracy. I'm sure that these 'solutions' would not be inexpensive, especially if the average campus's networking situation is anywhere near as kludged together as the one I attend.
I don't see what the RIAA is getting at here, unless they get some profits from however many of those filtering devices sell. If they do, though, I think that falls under the category of racketeering, though I'm far from an expert on the subject.
Its obvious that the RIAA has no future. I just want to know when they'll get around to realizing that.
Ok. I am a software maker (author of a couple of open source programs). And I occasionally like hacking (sorry, cracking), especially where I can prove that Windows security is lacking... So, if caught, I'll just claim my hacks were just probes to check whether there wasn't any kiddie porn on those company networks that I "tested". After all, as a software maker, it's my RIAA-given right to probe third parties for unauthorized activity!
it's the RIAA. A dinosaur whose right to exist has expired.
In my capitalism books, what is obsolete has to vanish to the market can concentrate on material that is valuable. Now, capitalism has been turned upside down. Obsolete companies and market structures are kept artificially alive with laws.
Roll back about 100 years, when the automobile came into existance and hackney coaches became obsolete. Remember the laws that look so stupid today? The "man waving a red flag that has to walk in front of automobiles" and similar rubbish? Same shit.
What did it serve? It was annoying then, and it's something we can only shake our heads at today. Who'd come up with a STUPID law like that?
Well, now you have it all over again. Instead of traffic laws, now it's copyright laws that come up with harebrained ideas to protect a business that is essentially dead.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
- Mandatory helmets and helmet cams to ensure that no one lends a copyrighted cd to his/her friend
- Mandatory mic implants to ensure that noone murmurs a copyrighted song while going to work and back
- Mandatory in-house representatives to ensure copyrighted lullabies are not sung to babies
- Mandatory arse cams to ensure that noone does sharing while 'online shitting'
Read radical news here
Assuming university computer networks are not public, wouldn't that constitute illegal access to their computer systems? I don't remember anything in the law suggesting it was okay to illegally access someone's system if you thought there was abuse of your IP going on...not that we're buying RIAA's definition of abusing IP in the first place.
Why isn't the FBI asking RIAA how they got access to those networks? Perhaps they're busy out intimidating Republican political opponents. It is getting down to six months before the election, this would be their busy time of year.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
...and I, for one, can't wait to see it happen.
These schools (and, eventually, all others) are going to have to ban all RIAA recordings, in ANY format including CD and tape, from their campuses, with violations subject to immediate seizure and disposal. That includes blocking any radio feeds and frequencies that carry their tunes. That's the only way to end the legal exposure to RIAA racketeering.
There's plenty of good music out there that isn't RIAA-tainted. Blanket-banning the tainted stuff will be a GOOD thing.