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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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They don't always get that option. Back when I was at Berkeley in 2000, bandwidth was getting hammered hard. Some people even thought of getting their own service, but phone and cable co.s don't have the necessary access to the dorm network that they would need to put that in place, and rescomp wouldn't give it to them anyway.
Course, it has been 6 years, things may have changed, but I doubt it...
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.
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.
That is the basis of both "information wants to be free" and "copyright infringement is not theft [in the literal sense]".
Jefferson's works make me wish Amnesty International hadn't already appropriated the candle-and-barbed-wire logo for themselves.
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Doesn't that kinda depend on being able to use the bandwidth for something useful, though?
If the university is offering high-speed Internet access for free to students, then restricting it to ensure it's properly available for academic use is one thing. If they're actually charging for it at a market rate, then restricting it is completely out of line. If the students start doing illegal stuff with it, sure, kick 'em off if it's causing problems, but don't block stuff by default even for those who are using those technologies for constructive purposes when those people are paying for the privilege.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Why would you say the second isn't a good reason? Responding to properly submitted legal papers is a requirement of such an organization. Even if it turns out that the RIAA ends up unable to make their case, the university still has to bear the cost of responding to subpoenas.
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.
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)
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.
And it is not just a pedantic point.
Yeah, it really is. And your email example is bogus too: if I return those emails, I do it by connecting back to an email server. The email server doesn't connect to me.
I don't think there is any good technical or legal definition of what a "client" and "server" computer are.
Try this one: If I can remotely connect to your computer and induce it to perform a non-trivial function at my convenience, its a server.
We firewall jockeys even have a precise technical definition: If your machine accepts a SYN packet and responds with a SYN/ACK, or if your machine expects to receive the first in a series of UDP packets on a particular port, its a server.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
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.