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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
The Blizzard downloader uses Bittorrent to download patches.
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.
I think water would do just fine
file sharing != copyright infringement != stealing
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
Ohio University has announced a policy that restricts all fire sharing on the campus network
... is this another nail in the coffin of internet freedom in American universities or a needed step to prevent illegal fire sharing? >
Oh No! How will pyromaniacs share now? But seriously, it's kind of sad that a major error like that can slip through... twice.
CATS/Diebold '08- All your vote are belong to us!
I've worked at a college, in an average week we would get 10-15 riaa letters (with our seemly small number of 3000 residents), and responding to them gets to be a huge chore. Most campuses are taking the "we don't want to get sued, so we will not put ourselves in that position" approach, so ignoring those letters is not an option.
At the place i worked at, for a while we did try to block kazaa and the like, the problem was that there would always be a new protocol that would pop up to take it's place. We eventually gave up on blocking it because of this.
This story is really not a new thing in the university world, most have a policy of limiting the student's ability to fileshare (some through innocent means like NAT routing, others through throttling the bandwidth for those services).
So before we all get up in arms that people are limiting access, you'd think again when you have to call 20 people in a day, tell them why their access has been shut off, and have every one of them claim that they've never file shared in their lives. Only to get the call the next day where they complain that their their myspace is too slow.
If that was the reason, they'd just throttle it to a reasonable level. Also, if you would RTFA, that's not the reason that they give for blocking it; they just give it a mention after talking about all of the RIAA threats.
So a few weeks back, everyone finds out that Ohio University leads the country in file sharing. Now instead of taking steps to try to curb this, they just announce they'll cut it off all together. I'm sure they felt pretty embarrassed being on top of the list, but there are other options.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Applause to the BOFH that has pushed it through, though I would have done it differently.
Most university IPs are real on a really high speed connected LAN. As a result they get elected to supernode status by most modern P2P applications. As a result the university network becomes a jump point for NAT traversal for all leaches within 30-60ms rtt around it. As a result the resource usage is clearly disproportional to the actual on-campus usage. Essentially all small and medium corporates and home users sitting behind firewalls in the immediate vicinity live off that resource and steal a significant portion of the Ohio University network capacity.
Personally, if I was the admin, I would have tried to QoS P2P down (and net neutrality be damned) to the point where the campus is made equivalent to the rest of the world.
Unfortunately even if the protocols were easier to isolate, that may be quite difficult for a network the size of Ohio State. Most network equipment used at the bandwidths in question cannot do selective delays and probability drops very well. The P2P applications nowdays make the "if the protocols are easier to isolate" statement false anyway. All the developers know that they are committing a resource theft and they go way beyond what is considered spyware tactics to achieve their aims (current Skype is a fine example of this).
So on the balance of things, just banning them to hell is probably the most cost effective options. Congrats and applause. Can we have more of that please. A few more and the net economics will go back to where they belong so people actually start looking at things like multicast and frontline in-local-loop delivery instead emulating it through resource theft.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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.
"!"
You can tunnel just about any service over any other on a TCP/IP network. Do they plan on blocking http? email? ssh? ping? If so, why offer any network access at all? If not, I'm sure the students are already at work with various stegenographic and tunneling techniques that let your share files over unconventional services. Also, when I share with my college peers, I generally just do so using a usb disk drive that I carry with me. I can move tens of gigs of data in just a few minutes. Does the university plan on doing a full cavity search of all students to make sure that they don't possess any readable/writable media? This is the information age. You can't stop people from sharing information! (fucking Luddites)
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
"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.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Freedom is about being able to do what you want. Responsibility is knowing what to do with your freedom.
Port blocking, while it will restrict copyright violations - is a restriction of freedom.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I went through those problems living in a dorm, then they blocked p2p using the completely bogus "to stop viruses" excuse.
for the next 2 years the network was crawling even slower than it was before.
as for "non-school related activities": people live there. Its their home. I suppose university students are just supposed to be machines who do nothing but eat sleep and work, and of course obey whatever nanny-school tells them?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Applications by incoming freshman has dropped by 50%!!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
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.
Generally, universities own all rights of way on their campuses. That's certainly the case here. All data, telephone, cable, water, electricity, all provided by the university to all buildings on campus proper, which includes the dorms. Thus you have no option but the provided dorm service. Here that's not a problem for most students, as we aren't dicks about it and provide pretty good service. However if they don't like it, there's nothing they can do. They cannot order other service, it simply is not available.
What may happen, and should happen to universities that restrict it like this, is they should get sued. There are limits to a public university's ability to compete with and to keep out private companies. This would be more than enough to insist that they need to be let in. Massive problem for the university to make that happen though.
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.
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.
I've talked with some people in a couple of colleges in Mexico city. Here in Mexico filesharing isn't prosecuted as much as it is in the US - and yet I've seen bans in filesharing. Reason? Bandwidth. In one particular college, P2P activity covered around 99% of network activity, and webbrowsing became as slow as molasses until filesharing applications (napster at that time) were prohibited.
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)
First of all, accounting is a pain in the ass. Billing is problematic, and tacking it onto the fee statement tends to get irate parents calling once the bill comes due. "What do you mean Johnny racked up $1000 in bandwidth usage this semester?!"
Also, dealing with copyright complaints is time-consuming. The requirements in dealing with these notices include not only determining the name of the user who allegedly infringed, but also removing the infringing content. In the case of a university network, this means contacting the student regarding the incident, and telling them to stop sharing.
Blocking en masse means that word will spread quickly. You'll get a lot of complaints at first, but they'll trickle off once it becomes the norm. I don't necessarily agree with their decision, but it certainly means less work for the university staff in the long run.
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.
I completely agree with many of the people who have said that the universities should charge for bandwidth. I go to Cornell University and this is in fact what is done here on campus. In the newer dorms you can buy TV connections and therefore get cable internet, or you can use the on campus internet. For anyone who uses the on campus internet service, ResNet, their usage is monitored. We are given 5 GB/month and each additional GB is $1.50. This is only for off campus traffic however so there is still a lot of on campus P2P sharing. But, I think this is a much better step than completely stopping traffic outright. Students are free to do what they want and the university is reimbursed if someone goes crazy with bandwidth.
That changes nothing. Especially if you want to try to make the argument that if a given percentage of something is used for illegal activity, the whole thing should be outlawed. You'd be surprised at the things you'd be talking about banning in that case. The original argument still stands: Simply get an application layer filter. They are not expensive in relation to other high end networking gear, and it will solve the problem without resorting to a ban. I speak as someone who works at a university with just such systems in place.
When new technology develops and taxes the available systems, the answer is to work out a better system, not to start banning new technology.
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
When I went to OU, I lived in dorms for 3 years. Every room is provided with at least one school computer/monitor/printer, and often more, not to mention that IT would lend you a hub for free if you needed more ports, plus free wifi for students nearly campus-wide, and plenty of empty, air conditioned computer labs (rarely used because most people were using their computers in their rooms or their laptops on wifi... Beowulf, anyone?). So even the poorest student has PLENTY of accessibility.
Back then, there was a lot of port throttling going on. Trying to serve anything from inside campus was nearly impossible due to the bandwidth being quickly throttled down, even on port 80. As for getting information from outside the campus network, only port 80 worked with any reasonable speed. Other ports were throttled back to the extreme, so much that watching a streaming video was often impossible. If you think academic information only comes in the form of text on a web page, you're mistaken - as a music major, there were tons of video and audio resources made unavailable by draconian bandwidth throttling. And no, I'm not going to send a special request to IT for each instance; that's impractical.
While it is obvious that many students choose to infringe on copyright law, the true problem I believe is bandwidth usage. College is so expensive that I don't think any student would bat an eye at an extra $100/month in bandwidth expenses, to say the least. That's about the cost of books, though internet access provides enormous academic and social benefits.
The best way to handle the situation is to provide more than enough bandwidth for academic and social needs, and try students who infringe on copyright law in school court. If they're found guilty, they get kicked out of school for a year.
Add on to all this that OU subscribes to CDigix for all students - even if you live off campus. This company provides students with tons of cd quality music, entire albums, etc., of not only popular but also obscure artists, and it's completely legal, and many students are very happy with the content it provides.
Because of the quick pace of technology change, banning p2p seems unwise to me. However, OU is a business, and like any business, it will do whatever the directors feel it needs to in order to make as much money as quickly as possible.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
"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 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.
The Blizzard downloader uses a form of the Bittorrent protocol - a broken, noncompliant, single purpose form of the protocol - to download patches. It doesn't actually use a Bittorrent client, or any of the same ports.
It's the margarine of the 'torrent world.
DATABASE WOW WOW
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.
You have no idea what the hell you're talking about. Of Ohio State's $3.76 billion 2006/2007 budget, only $510 million (13.5%) came from state appropriations.
Considerably more money ($921 million / 24.5%) came from students. And even more than that came from the hospital that Ohio State operates.
Is this information hard to find? No! It's right on the Ohio State site, right here.
The fact is, at Ohio State, students funding is twice as big a factor as state funding. And student funding isn't a "small fraction" - it's nearly a quarter of the entire budget.
I go to a "state funded" school (University of Colorado at Boulder), but Colorado only contributes 8.1% of the funding for my university. Student fees and tuition contribute 39% of the budget - almost five times as much as state funding.
I am so sick and tired about this "what are my tax dollars doing" bullshit with regards to educational institutions. There are 26,000 people who attend my university. That's larger than most of the cities in Wyoming.
If a city offered municipal internet access (as many Slashdot users would like), would it be OK if the city decided that you shouldn't be allowed to use? What if the city prevented other providers from offering services on their premises?
Here we go again. Because, if someone is using BitTorrent, they must be a dirty criminal. Give me a break. There are so many legitimite uses for P2P that it's not even funny. I downloaded an Ubuntu CD when 7.04 came out using BitTorrent. Public domain and educational materials - including videos - are distributed with BitTorrent. There are even professors on campus who use BitTorrent to distribute video lectures.
Maybe you are too short-sighted to see the many uses of P2P technology. Guess what? The vast majority of email sent today is spam. That doesn't mean that email isn't a valuable tool.
I remember when Bill Owens made an incredibly stupid statement about how CU should dismiss a particular professor. Owens didn't seem to understand that universities have a large degree of autonomy - it's not the Governor who selects the Regents, it's the voters. If you don't like what's happening at Ohio State, elect different representatives. But don't go pretending that the State legislature should make policy decisions. Ohio doesn't like it when the Federal Government decides to interfere. Your City Council doesn't like it when the State interferes.
According to Wikipedia the .torrent file can be extract from the blizzard downloader and used with another bittorrent client.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_Downloader
If a normal client can exchange data with peers using the Blizzard downloader then how, broken, non-compliant can it be? Also what difference does the port in use have to do with compliance? I use uTorrent and it seems to work fine on whatever port I feel like using.
Bandwidth isn't unlimited, there's only so much of it. Buying more capacity costs money.
Faced with more bandwidth demand than supply and no income from bandwidth charges, a University IT department (or an ISP selling "Unlimited Internet") will tend to look at their bandwidth usage and make calls like "60% of our bandwidth usage is coming from these 8 guys running servers. If we just ban servers we won't need to upgrade". So they implement that policy by blocking incoming TCP connections with a firewall and it buys them a couple months - at the horrific hidden cost of turning what was previously a general internet connection into a "consume only" connection. The first google servers were in Larry Paige's dorm room - who knows how college students might take advantage of having a general purpose internet connection...
Eventually, bandwidth usage will rise again and the IT department will be faced with the same situation: "60% of our bandwidth usage is coming from users doing P2P file sharing". But they can't fix this with a single firewall rule - so they're faced with the decision of buying active traffic shaping hardware or upgrading their bandwidth. Traffic shaping is cheaper than adding capacity, so they do that. They think they're only hurting "a couple students claiming to download Linux distros", but they're really killing ideas like blogtorrent. Basically, this is the same as the server block - it just costs more money in hardware.
If, instead, the school just charged for bandwidth - perhaps $0.25 for each gig after the first 5 gigs/month - this would play out completely differently. There would be an incentive for users to not outright waste bandwidth, and when it came time to chose between upgrading and degrading the school internet connection it would always be better to upgrade.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.