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Ohio University Blocks P2P File Sharing
After receiving the highest number of notices from the RIAA about P2P file sharing, Ohio University has announced a policy that restricts all fire sharing on the campus network. Some file-sharing programs that could trigger action are Ares, Azureus, BitTorrent, BitLord, KaZaA, LimeWire, Shareaza and uTorrent. Claiming that this effort is 'to ensure that every student, faculty member and researcher has access to the computer resources they need,' is this another nail in the coffin of internet freedom in American universities or a needed step to prevent illegal fire sharing?
I wonder what level are they blocking?
If its at the wall, won't internal sharing continue?
Just because you can stop the data coming in via p2p means doesn't mean the data won't be there (waste/DC can exist in a private garden without ever touching the real net).
Or is this an active process which does a portscans your machine continuously?
Failing everything else, there is always sneakernet. Expect a rise in blanks in the area.
liqbase
They stop file sharing because it's clogging the network and people can't use it for real work. Please stop bitching about your perceived birth-right of file sharing.
It's not a "nail in the coffin" of anything. If college kids have to pay a bit for their own connection, they will. Hell, I bet most college kids these days all have cable TV. What's another $20/month on a $100/month cable bill? They call their cable company, tack on the service, and it's over. No controversy.
I don't respond to AC's.
My college, which is private, doesn't allow even iTunes sharing amongst the students, because the bandwidth usage slows everything down significantly. Now, this is a private school and we aren't rolling in money, but it's still an issue.
It's about controlling bandwidth costs that have soared as a result of the explosive growth of p2p traffic. I have spoken with several large ISP's in the past year and most of them quote numbers like 65-75% of their total traffic is p2p. Given the demographic makeup of most universities, I'd bet their percentage is even higher. Those big fiber pipes cost big bucks.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
1 != 2 != 1
Illegal ONLY if THE MAN Catches ME !!
Muuuhahahahahaha
The problem I have with these kinds of regulations is the confusion between the medium which is used to transport the data, and the message, the specific data being transported. If the Uni is unhappy about copyright violations, that's one thing; or if they have bandwidth problems, that's legit; but restricting specific protocols and programs does not accurately target the problem behavior. They seem to adopt the maxim that "the Medium is the Message"; that is, if something is being transferred by Bittorrent, it is a copyright violation. And granted, that is the case much of the time.
But it is not a perfect correlation. Banning Bittorrent will hamper downloading Linux ISOs and other high traffic, legitimate materials. There is no justification for saying that file sharing as a whole is illegal, any more than you could say that using the Internet is illegal even if it turns out that much traffic violates the law.
Everyone else is going to be "OMG lamerz teh MAFIAAAAA won because of retard schoolz like u" but seriously, why is this not a good idea? It's the school's network, the RIAA is actually on their tails trying (however illegally or immorally) to punish their students, and they have every right to restrict the use of file sharing services on their network.
Yes, I know that there are great legal uses for BitTorrent, but do you really think 95% of the students are using it to legally download Ubuntu or something? Yeah right. Get real and be honest with yourselves, this is probably a smart thing for the school to be doing. If the students want to download whatever they want, then they need to pay for their own DSL or move out of the dorms and be responsible for their own actions (gee, what a thought), but while they're using the school's network and the school is somewhat responsible for them, I think it's perfectly reasonable to restrict their illegal file sharing.
It's a whole other argument whether the RIAA sucks (they do) and whether file sharing positively impacts the recording industry (it might) but for a school, come on, it's their right, and probably the right thing for them to do. Get over it.
"!"
"Nail in the coffin of internet freedom" is a bit of an overstatement. There's no free lunch. Dealing with DMCA takedown notices is a huge burden on campus IT staff (our campus has a network security officer who has spent most of his tenure chasing movies and music) which cannot be ignored without the risk of losing the campus's protection under the DMCA safe-harbor provisions. Further, campuses don't have a magically free internet connection. Most pay into a state-wide consortium for Internet2 access then pay an additional, metered rate for commercial internet traffic. Why should universities spend limited resources to subsidize torrent traffic?
Now before anyone talks about the legitimate p2p use, even that is a questionable use of university resources. Ideally p2p shares bandwidth costs so that everyone gets something for a minor contribution. This doesn't necessarily work out to the benefit of universities since their fat, low-latency pipes take priority over the narrow, slow-upload-speed DSL and cable-folks. Ultimately, the universities have to allocate resources to support university business and this policy must be seen as a business decision. If it is necessary for an aspect of university business, I suspect an exception will be allowed as soon as a faculty member makes the request. If the students are miffed, they can pay for commercial wireless access (like most cell phone companies offer) for on campus or use xDSL or cable at home.
and both isp subscribers and students pay big bucks, or is 5 figures a year not enough for them?
its one thing to apply qos to manage bandwidth, its quite another to start making student's choices for them and refusing to provide "internet" service.
especially for isp's.. if they cant provide the bandwidth they sold to their customers then they should be sued for fraud, not allowed to strip down and hobble what they advertised as "unlimited". Lesson to learn: don't oversell your bandwidth.
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Funny how the same baseless arguments are playing over and over like a broken record.
Face it-- downloading music is probably wrong, regardless of what you personally believe, unless you go out and buy an equal number of CDs for every album you download. Yes, it is a free non-rival good, but you should still be paying for it in some sense if you're getting something out of it. Anything less is just lying to yourself about the morality of the issue. There's no guaranteed "right to free music" for you or anyone else, nor should there be; try thinking about it that way.
Of course it's extremely complex -- for instance, I prefer to balance the RIAA and friends amorality by buying Indie CDs instead of big labels to pay for my "illegal" downloads. Yes, I know I'm a hypocrite, but who isn't? I know it's wrong, and I'm not pretending otherwise, but I am trying to realize the balance of "wrongness" and trying to work the free market toward supporting those who need it most.
But to stick to this incessant rambling about "it's not stealing you idiots, I'm not depriving anyone of anything" -- yes, we get it, how about a new tune? What's the next step? How do we support artists instead of using their music without paying? or, how do we support the artists themselves instead of letting 90% of the profit go to the RIAA? There are bigger fish to fry than protecting your own (non-existent) right to free music, so try putting all that brainpower to good use. We're gonna need it.
"!"
Didn't Ohio University already have a policy against students placing servers on the Internet? Hello! When you run P2P, you're running a server!
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I've said it before and I'll say it again.
Pirates use something because it's the BEST way to do something.
Why? because they have total freedom to choose the best, because, due to their nature, they don't pay for anything.
Thus, outlawing something because pirates use it is shooting yourself (or at least technical progress itself) in the foot.
Sony's views on the xvid codec originally brought this thought to my mind when they prevented sony vegas 5 or 6 from working with it, under that same logic I'd say ban sony vegas itself, I hear it's still incredibly popular with pirates.
While your at it you'd better do something to shut down Maya, 3dstudio and Photoshop.
http://www.gigatribe.com/tour/accueil.php
wasn't listed as a banned client. If more people start using encrypted clients, university net admins will have to do traffic shaping. If the RIAA and MPAA can't figure out what's being downloaded in an encrypted stream, why would the university care?
Until the school gets sued, and the courts rule that they have to now allow students to purchase third part services. It's real likely they would in a case like this and it'll be expensive as hell for the university to implement. When you are a public university, you have to be careful what restrictions you implement. Dorms are people's residences and there are rights that come with that. For example you could make a rule saying that employees can enter a room at any time for any reason, and you could give them keys to do so. You'd quickly find out, however, that the police disagreed with that view and those responsible would be in trouble, possibly jail.
Remember: Nearly all university students are adults, with all the rights it implies. Universities don't get to take those away just because they feel it is convenient. Dorms in many ways have to be treated like apartments: Just because you own them, doesn't mean you have unlimited rights to them.
Applying QoS across the board on all known P2P applications would not be a violation of net neutrality. Arguably, neither would applying QoS for a single standard (de facto or de jure) protocol, like BitTorrent.
What would be a violation of net neutrality would be if they applied QoS to BitTorrent, except to certain sites that paid the university a fee.
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Instead of whinning, now that it's perfectly possible to do so, why don't you set up a wireless meshed network that students will use over the gestapoed university network ?
While this horribly draconian, stupid, pointless, and a fine example of educational institutions once again bending to the whim of content industry cartels, if they are going to be like that, they should treat dorms like every other apartment building in the world and allow the students to purchase their own internet connection if the ToS for the campus internet isn't acceptable (I would consider the inability to use Bittorrent completely unacceptable and barely worth being called "internet"). Chances are a student at this university will not only not be able to use the internet they pay for properly, it's not likely they'll be able to find an alternative ISP. Which should be illegal.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
Yes. As legal as it is legal to force you to wear clothing while on their campus, and as legal as preventing you from pointing a gun at someone and shooting. There's no federal or state right to being allowed to use torrents while on university campuses. The prevailing thought among a "me" centered generation, however, is that we have a RIGHT to do whatever we want. Well, do somethings and you get punished; in order to do some things, you might have to move. Want to use torrents? Don't go to Ohio State. Not a complex logical problem.
ahh the classic black and white approach.
people have been recording radio and copying tapes for decades, and that "violation of exclusivity" didn't do anything to the bottom line.
if you want to start defining that as theft, then i say turn about's fair play:
what did the RIAA companies steal?
1 - the public domain: they've extended copyright from 17 years to life+70, assuring only quaint anachronisms will be in the public domain from now on.
2 - competition in the tech sector: their government granted priviledge(not right) of exclusivity did not cover carte blanch regulatory control over all electronics through sneaky leverage of DMCA section 1201. it's been stated over and over again this was unintended, but it only takes one corrupt politician to prevent a law being repealed.
3 - fair use and individual property/privacy rights: once you've purchased a copy you have the right to do anything with it short of distribution. They have used DRM and the DMCA to stop that.
so they "stole" 3 times, and we're "stealing" it back.
theyre reaping what they sow, and i have no sympathy for them as they receive their recompence full circle.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Ahh yes, just fall back to the old "child porn" argument. I mean anyone should be willing to do anything to stop child porn! Wrong. Changes nothing. That's a real crime, investigated by the real cops. So what happens is they get a wiretap warrant, because simply having an IP number wouldn't be enough for criminal court. They then get real, admissible, evidence and bust the person. This isn't a problem when you are a legit law enforcement entity trying to track down a real criminal. It is just a problem to an industry association that likes to spray out lawsuit threats, without any good standard of evidentiary checking.
That can be addressed, too, by requiring proxies to access actual Internet services. Don't like it? Move off-campus and get your own connection, where we won't have to deal with the complaints.
Since the problem is typically providing the copyrighted material (rather than simply downloading it), this would solve a lot of those problems. People would bitch, and the university would point to the p2p problem and explain that it was their fellow students who caused the lockdown.
The whole thing irritates me, but there doesn't appear to be an end in sight. You're corresponding with someone who deals with this problem daily, and with 8-10 complaints per day, it's a pain in the ass. I'd love a solution that doesn't involve restricting the students, allows us to maintain reasonably long logs, and doesn't cause our bandwidth to spike all day long. Right now, my best idea is to outsource the dorm network. I don't think my bosses will go for that, though.
IF stealing a car and copying a song are different, why are you saying they are the same? Why are you contradicting yourself? Logically, legally, they are not and for good reason. One = deprival of somebody's property or whatnot without permission and importantly, removing it from their posession. The other you are looking for, copyright infringement, is making a copy of data that violates the applicable restrictions, "rights," without depriving the owner of anything they had before, or of any property, though a breach of rights has occured alone this is different from theft. You also fail to back up your claim with little reasoning more than "it is, it is, it is, repeat argument, repeat argument". I also like how you lump all music downloading as one, broad big bad act, when many musicians would disagree with your stance quite strongly.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
The "nail in the coffin of internet freedom in American universities"?
/sarcasm
If you want your concerns to be taken seriously, stop asking the rest of us to play fools. EVERYONE knows what most students most use P2P for: transferring materials in violation of copyright.
You have some gall to suppose that the TAXPAYERS of the State of Ohio should continue subsidizing your illegal acquisition of movies and software and porn while you whine about "internet freedom".
You can have all the freedom you want (within the bounds of the law) just as soon as you move off campus and foot the bill for it yourself.
You are being deprived of about as much "freedom" as your parents requiring you to be home by midnight when you take THEIR car out.
And what about the legitimate uses that you will no doubt trumpet (because of course, *you* have never used P2P for any purpose inconsistent with the educational mission of the institution)?
It says right in the announcement that exceptions will be made for LEGITIMATE needs for P2P use. Developing a new P2P client and need to test it out on the dorm network? Go ask your technical coordinator; he or she will work with you to meet your needs consistent with the eductational mission of the institution. Need to collect real world data on a new exotic P2P network structure you are researching for your team project? Go ask IT services; they are there to help you. Need to download the latest copy of Linux Distro X available only on BitTorrent? Yup, that's legitimate too. Go ask.
Now, if it turns out that they can not accomodate your legitimate educational needs when you go ask, then you might have something to complain about.
But until then, if you feel that you need unrestricted P2P, you'll have to take it to the taxpayers of your state who are subsidizing your activity. I'm sure they'll be happy to cough up a few more dollars so that you can download porn faster.
"and both isp subscribers and students pay big bucks, or is 5 figures a year not enough for them?"
NO, students do not pay big bucks. Students pay a small fraction of the highly subsidized costs of their education - tuition, facilities, infrastructure, salaries - at a TAXPAYER funded public institution such as Ohio University.
And I assure you, the taxpayers of Ohio have much better things to do with their money than to foot enormous bandwidth bills so that students can illegally download copyrighted music, movies, and porn faster. I'd like to see them take that argument to the floor of their state legislature.
"Hay guys, I used to download movies and porn really quick, but now it's slowed to a trickle. Please increase the property tax levy to PIMP MY P2P!"
That's why people who aren't 20 year old college students don't give two shits about your "plight".
If it's anything like the Linux mirror at my school, you won't find anything released within the last two years on the IT department's servers. It's a decent idea in theory, but in practice I think that between the frequent releases and various distributions it probably doesn't save much bandwidth over individual downloads. Sure, you save a bit when multiple people want the same file; on the other hand, you have to maintain up-to-date versions of all the different versions, even if no one wants that particular release. (Note, however, that I've never actually seen the statistics. I'm basing this on the fact the our IT department didn't bother keeping their mirror up-to-date.)
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
if they cant provide the bandwidth they sold to their customers then they should be sued for fraud, not allowed to strip down and hobble what they advertised as "unlimited".
The ISPs contend that unlimited meant always-connected, not always maxed-out. I wish they didn't put that bit in the fine print of an ad, but I've seen it there.
Lesson to learn: don't oversell your bandwidth.
Bandwidth overselling is one way that that ISPs can give you an affordable rate. I've heard of ISP techs saying that they use as much as a 50:1 oversell rate and only very rarely does anyone notice. They aren't providing a guaranteed bandwidth, for that, they want more money, such as providing a more expensive service such as what they sell to businesses.
It's a public institution so there's some fairly strict rules on competition with, and exclusion of, private industry. Since they have a government granted monopoly in many ways, there's rules on how they can use it. Also, there's simple rules relating to housing. A dorm room is your home, and it is protected by the same rules. Police need a search warrant to enter, for example, they can't just go over your head and ask the university. Thus you have rights to get services there, and competitive ones at that. The school can't force you to pay $100/month to use their special phone service any more than an apartment could.
So if the school is going to severely limit their net access, especially in a way that will affect things you'd normally do (WoW uses BT for updates for example) the students would have a real good anti-competition case.
Our network people on campus have had to put thought in to this since we don't want it here.
The RIAA almost always has a very strong case.
No they don't. They have an IP address and an accusation, many of which have been proved false. What they have is the strength of bad laws that allow them to take everything you own or waste it all with court motions, both of which are better called "judicial extortion" than justice.
1) Sending someone else's creative work to ten thousand of your best friends is not speech.
Keeping me from publishing my own work on the network I pay for is a violation of free speech.
If you want to publish your own content via p2p, go ahead and do so on a network that isn't subsidized by the rest of your community.
First, because the networks are highly regulated all of them are publically subsidized. The network operators may not be living up to their obligations and might have wasted two hundred billion of your dollars, but they are ultimately yours and can be ordered to perform.
Second, how can I share by P2P when idiot operators block my traffic? I can buy all the hardware and service I want, but I won't be able to use it if it's censored at the receiving end.
Make no mistake, the big publishers want to make the internet look like cable TV and they are almost there. Unless you fight for your rights, you will play no further part than as a "consumer" and others will continue to own your culture.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
BitTorrent is also used for a lot of other 100% legitimate things. OSU has a sizeable computer science department and offers a lot of courses related to UNIX/Linux. I wonder if they realize that these days the most common way to get ISO's for Linux is BitTorrent?
Aside from all that, this effort is somewhat futile since many clients support encrypted/tunneled transfers and/or using Tor. From my experience, Tor traffic is nearly impossible to reliably classify (and therefore block).
A university will already have a fileserver with the required linux ISOs on it, for download internally. The same with all other required software. No bittorrent needed (and it's far from the most common way to get it.. it's still much faster to go to the ftp site and download it directly).
The Linux ISO excuse has been used so much now that it's used as code for Warez/Porn, as in 'I went over my bandwidth cap downloading Linux ISOs'.
Bittorrent has legitimate uses in the same way an Uzi does. Sure, I could use it to shoot ducks, but...
That is the basis of both "information wants to be free" and "copyright infringement is not theft [in the literal sense]".
No, the basis for "copyright infringement is not theft" is the very nature of copyright.