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MPAA College Toolkit Raises Privacy, Security Concerns
An anonymous reader writes "The Motion Picture Association of America last month sent letters to the presidents of 25 major universities (pdf), urging them to download and install a 'university toolkit' to help identify students who were downloading/sharing movie files. The Washington Post's Security Fix blog reports that any university that installs the software could be placing a virtual wiretap on their networks for the MPAA (and the rest of the world) to listen in on all of the school's traffic. From the story: 'The MPAA also claims that using the tool on a university network presents "no privacy issues — the content of traffic is never examined or displayed.' That statement, however, is misleading. Here's why: The toolkit sets up an Apache Web server on the user's machine. It also automatically configures all of the data and graphs gathered about activity on the local network to be displayed on a Web page, complete with ntop-generated graphics showing not only bandwidth usage generated by each user on the network, but also the Internet address of every Web site each user has visited. Unless a school using the tool has firewalls on the borders of its network designed to block unsolicited Internet traffic — and a great many universities do not — that Web server is going to be visible and accessible by anyone with a Web browser."
I don't see the universities listed anywhere in the article. Which ones are they? We need to know so we can write them letters.
Any university that installs that has a problem. University networks are constantly "played with" by students, so the IT department has to be on the ball. Any dumb enough to install this probably have had many student hacks already...
An MPAA tool that runs on Linux... I can see a few Slashdot heads exploding from that conflict this very minute.
They're not chasing the money. They're chasing the people who can be made examples of.
They're not trying to find people who can pay the settlements -- they're looking for people they can establish the legal precedent and scare the crap out of people. In their mind, if they can stop it in the places where it happens most, and instill in people a great fear, then people will dutifully line up and buy tickets. This is all about the low-hanging fruit and those that can't easily defend themselves.
The MPAA doesn't give a flying fuck about privacy and security, at least not yours -- they care about their products, their revenue stream, and their business model.
You'll notice that just a few days ago we say a story of how an *AA sponsored bill is working its way through Congress which would require all universities to buy subscriptions for every student to Napster or risk losing federal support. In other words, they want to get paid for every single university student on the rationale that since they're all pirating, then the *AA's should get paid. Of course, they'll eventually want to extend to high schools, and then eventually to the rest of us.
What they're looking for is laws to reinforce their monopoly, government agencies to police their copyrights, and federally assured revenue streams. They don't give a rats ass about customers or the risk of how they might be perceived. They're incapable/unwilling to look at the bigger picture. I can understand their point to an extent -- they simply cannot fathom how to 'monetize' all of these digital things, and they're fighting back the only way they know how.
In their collective minds, if you can't afford to pay to see/hear/hum their products, you should simply do without. And, since they haven't been able to stop it, they're perfectly willing to shit in everyones shoes to get it stopped. If they can get government to do the heavy work, all the better for them.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Scarcity is a necessary economic principle even for intellectual items, and without it, you won't see anyone interested in producing intellectual works.
This of course is where we all disagree. I happen to believe - strongly - that you're wrong about this. Already we're seeing smart people (e.g. Madonna) distancing themselves from the labels and signing contracts with concert bookers instead. There will always be people interested in producing intellectual works, and there will always be people who will find a way to profit from it. With or without IP.
Dear MPAA and RIAA:
You've noticed that the number of students who think downloading movies and music via the internet is OK. Well, here's some news for you:
Vox populi, vox Dei.
You're not thinking like a MPAA/RIAA executive. MPAA/RIAA executives don't think logically with a long-term outlook. They think in terms of control and monetization over the short term. Will Action A have repercussions 5 years from now? Who cares? I (hypothetical RIAA/MPAA executive) will have made enough money to retire by then anyway.
Illegal downloads take music/movies out of their control. They won't admit this, but this issue is more important to them than the money. They don't care if the film downloaded was one that was otherwise sitting in the vault, available only on a dozen VHS copies left over from a network broadcast ten years ago. It's their property and if they want it to sit in the vault gathering dust, we the public should kiss their feet thanking them for that decision.
As far as the money is concerned, they think that these actions will make pirating movies less attractive which will drive more people to buy/rent movies and/or watch movies in the theater. No, don't argue back that pirated copies versus legal copies that would have been bought isn't a 1:1 ratio. Stuff like "ratios" sounds ominously like math to these executives. The only math they care about is the rate at which money is flowing into their pockets.
And speaking of "rate at which money is flowing", they feel entitled to constantly increasing profits year after year. After all, they've given us such quality works as Boy Band #34 and Third Sequel Of Generic Action Movie - Now With More Explosions. Why aren't we, the public, rushing out to the stores and shoving money into their pockets for this stuff? After all, Boy Band #7 did really well and they were basically the same guys as #34. Also, Generic Action Movie did pretty well in the box office. Why shouldn't the third sequel pull in even more money? (After all, the studio executives made sure the director added more explosions since they [the execs] knew that is what the public wanted.) Any appeals to logic about how spending money is tighter, how people have more options (online entertainment, video games, etc), or how quality is declining fall on deaf ears. After all, they got profit in the past and that means they should get bigger profit now. The only explanation has to be those dirty, rotten Internet pirates.
Of course, all of this isn't meant to excuse downloading something without the copyright owner's permission. I still think that you shouldn't do that. At the same time, however, I don't think that the MPAA/RIAA are living in the real world with some of the actions they have taken (and some of the things they have tried to get done). At best, they've lost whatever moral high ground they would have had. At worst, they've become so criminal that people committing massive copyright infringement actually have a degree of moral high ground over them.
In addition,
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
http://universitytoolkit.com/
;)
They don't appear to have a link to the source. Quick! Someone send them a DMCA takedown!
Sometimes, it's about right and wrong
... it's composed of a bunch of bad dudes, not the kind of people you want having any power over you whatsoever. The facts are thus: the media companies and their "trade organizations" have behaved very irresponsibly all down the line, and have hurt a lot of people. They absolutely should not be granted one iota more power. If anything they need to have their wings clipped. Period. END OF STATEMENT.
Couldn't agree more. The problem is that you seem confused about who is right. Your comment indicates a certain lack of awareness of the real societal issues (check out some of Ray Beckerman's writings if you want to get a handle on them.) Perhaps you work for a media company. Regardless, there's a lot more going on here that meets the eye.
I would also recommend reading the relevant portions of the Constitution, the history of copyright and its true purpose, current copyright law (what I was able to understand of it as a non-lawyer is depressingly unbalanced), and most important of all discover what the Founders (Jefferson in particular) believed is the proper role of copyright in our society. Once you understand that, you will see just how damaged we have been by the recent divergence in purpose, from promoting "the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" to "securing endless revenue streams for companies that have effectively stolen rights to the works whose authors they claim to represent." The power of Copyright has been conscripted by some particularly evil individuals, with the willing complicity of certain members of Congress. I presume you're an American: given our traditions of freedom and respect for individual rights I am amazed that you could take the position you have. Bankrupting college kids is not a solution: if you think it is you are in error, and are part of the problem.
The problem here is not copyright infringement: it's media companies setting themselves up as private police forces, with unchecked surveillance and enforcement capabilities, and no due process. That goes very much against the grain of, well, pretty much every civilized nation on the planet. These are powers that should be reserved for legitimate government, not the private sector. And don't even start with "they'll have their day in court" or "if they're innocent they have nothing to worry about." Would that were true, but of the thousands of people sued by the RIAA, how many people have actually fought back? How many had the resources to even try to fight back? A tiny fraction: the rest settled out-of-court regardless of actual guilt, the RIAA having served as judge, jury and executioner, using "evidence" (and I use the term loosely) that is largely manufactured out of thin air. Furthermore, the RIAA (and the MPAA) is much like the Internal Revenue Service
Furthermore, you seem to have forgotten that this is supposed to be a nation by, of and for The People. If we, as a nation, have decided that extended copyright and strict enforcement is not something we need or want then nobody, certainly not a bunch of mere copyright holders who themselves have created nothing have any moral high ground here whatsoever. It's a blind, unfounded assumption on your part that we need to get tough on copyright infringement, indeed that we need such extreme laws in the first place. I would argue that we never have, and do not now.
What we have here is a classic example of unenlightened capitalism, the kind of no-holds-barred screw-everyone-but-ourselves school of business management that does nothing but enrich a few at the expense of everyone else, causing a fair amount of collateral damage in the process. Worse yet, our entertainment industry (which at the present time is composed largely of foreign-owned corpor
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.