Marshall University Challenges RIAA

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Marshall University, in Huntington, West Virginia, has become just the second US college or university to show the moxie to stand up for its students instead of instantly caving in to RIAA extortion. In February, Marshall, represented by the Attorney General of the State of West Virginia, made a motion to quash the RIAA's subpoena for student identities, pointing out in exquisite detail in its long-time IT guy's affidavit (PDF) the impossibility of identifying copyright 'infringers' based on the RIAA's meager evidence. Unfortunately, the Magistrate — under the mistaken impression that the RIAA isn't going to sue the identified students, but merely wants to talk to them — recommended that the subpoena be okayed by the District Judge (PDF). It is not yet known whether Marshall will be filing objections. The first US college or university known to have attacked the RIAA's subpoena was the University of Oregon, which — also represented by its state's Attorney General — made a motion to quash last November, and even questioned the legality of the RIAA's methods. The Oregon motion is still pending."

Comments

Hunh?

[belmolis]

Unless I have missed something, the magistrate judge's opinion is not based on the idea that the RIAA "merely wants to talk to" the students. Where does it say that?

Curiously, the magistrate judge's opinion does not even address the central issue, of whether the RIAA's evidence is sufficient to support the subpoena. It is devoted entirely to the question of whether the subpoena imposes an excessive burden on the university. His ruling that the university's burden is not great because it is merely required to produced the names of the students associated with the IP addresses, not to determine who was using the machines at the times of the alleged infringement,appears to be correct.

Re:Hunh?

[corsec67]

Who says that an IP address can even be related to a specific computer, much less a person?

All the university would know is that something with a specific MAC address was using that IP at that specific time.

Since MAC addresses are spoofable, how can they be related to a specific person at all?

Re:Hunh?

[Sancho]

There's a chain of evidence which is used to get a person in many universities. It's the same way any ISP would track usage down to a specific user.

Users are typically registered. Usually in universities, this is accomplished through a captive portal which records the MAC and username (authenticated with a password.) This ties the MAC to the user. From there, it's trivial to tie the packets to the MAC--spoofing IP addresses is trivial on most networking equipment in use by universities (i.e. we're not talking crappy Linksys routers, here.) MAC spoofing is rare, but also quite easy to block on the switch, long before any damning traffic occurred. Even if it isn't explicitly blocked, it would be a special case that would need to be handled when trying to identify the student, but it is by no means a dealbreaker.

Of course, if the student is running a wireless access point, you run into problems. This is why some universities don't allow wireless access points to be connected to the network (they can't outright ban them due to FCC regulations) and the university agreements almost universally state that traffic originating from the student's port is considered to be the student's liability.

ISPs (including universities) have valid reasons for wanting to be able to track people down. It's unfortunate that the ability to track people down means that they can give up their information when the RIAA comes subpoenaing.

This is a shake down

[DrLang21]

There is no way that the Magistrate actually believes that the RIAA does not intend to sue these students. No reasonable individual could possibly look at the recent history and believe that they had any intentions other than to demand a large settlement or to sue for even larger damage claims. If the Magistrate believes otherwise, their ability to perform their job should be brought into question.