Online Quiz As a Gateway to P2P

Andy Guess points out an interesting approach taken by a Missouri university to limiting (and limiting legal exposure because of) on-campus, on-line copyright violations, as described at Inside Higher Ed: "In order to download (or upload) files on any peer-to-peer network whatsoever, all on-campus users at Missouri S&T have to pass an online quiz on copyright infringement. But not just once. Passing the test — with a perfect score — enables peer-to-peer access for six hours on the user's on-campus registered machines."

Comments

48 hours a month

[Anonymous Coward]

Passing the test -- with a perfect score -- enables peer-to-peer access for six hours on the user's on-campus registered machines, presumably enough time to download that (legal) song, TV show or e-book. The next time, the student, staff or faculty member has to go to the intranet Web page and take the randomized test again, for a maximum of eight uses per month (which, kind of like vacation days, can accrue to at most 20).

So basically, their students can access the internet for 48 hours a month. Sounds great.

Re:48 hours a month

[orclevegam]

I imagine most of the CS department would bail. You'd be left with the two ends of the bell curve though. On the one side you'd have the ones so technically inept that the loss of a major chunk of the internet wouldn't even register on them. On the other end you'd have the ones who've already setup encrypted tunnels out of the schools network and are completely un-constrained by anything the school could possibly do short of physically cutting their network (or killing any encrypted traffic, but that would negate any secure web browsing). It's fairly simple to bounce a port through SSH running on 443, although it does eat up bandwidth on a server somewhere. You could also encrypt the P2P traffic without proxying the connection, but that's a good bit simpler to detect (unlike using a port 443 proxy where there's only 2 ways of detecting it, decrypt the stream, or fingerprint the remote server).

test eh?

[geekoid]

Let's see this 'test'
Is it a test of the specific actual copyright law? Os it some thing put together by someone who thinks they know copyright law?

I would love to see a copyright attorney go over the test. One that isn't employed by a media company.

Every 6 hours is just stupid.

Re:Yeah, everyone will answer that quiz honestly.

[hansraj]

I don't think the idea is to know the intent of the users. Like you humorously pointed out, that would make no sense. Upon trying to make sense of this policy, I could come up with the following possible explanation. Of course I might be mistake :-)

I suppose the motives (or rather hopes) are based on two ideas:

1) By making the system inconvenient (even mildly so), discourages the "casual" p2p users. I have no idea what fraction of users are "casual" though.

2) Cognitive dissonance. Probably the idea is that once the users are forced to repeat certain beliefs in their head (even when they disagree with them), many will actually feel a psychological dissonance simply because the reward is not too great. One way to get rid of it, would be to actually start believing whatever they replied in the questionnaire.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Induced_compliance_studies

Of course cognitive dissonance does not seem to be the perfect phenomenon in use here, I wouldn't be surprised if something very similar was going on. Any psychologists in the house today?

Re:misguided nannying

[cavePrisoner]

Another quote from the link in parent: "Many people would never dream of walking into a store and stealing a CD or a DVD. Why? Because it's against the law. " I can't speak for anybody else, but I don't steal a physical CD or DVD because stealing is immoral. I am depriving the store owner of what is rightfully his. I don't care about the law. If something is illegal but moral, the law should be disregarded. I'm not depriving anybody of anything when I copy a sequence of bits, (assuming I would not have paid for the CD) so I don't see the moral issue. Oh, right, this is America. Carry on.

Re:Yeah, everyone will answer that quiz honestly.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, if they prosecute someone for copyright infringement, it makes the case against them that much stronger, possibly even willful. Willful infringement is probably a lot more expensive (IANAL - I think it's maybe 3x damages if infringement shown to be willful).

Explained

[tepples]

Everyone will be a fat lesbian with a famously MILFy mom?

Joke fails it.

The Chastity Bono Act is the name that I have always used to refer to the sequel to the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (aka the Sonny Bono Act). Some analysts interpret the Supreme Court's upholding of the CTEA in Eldred v. Ashcroft (2003) as giving Congress a blank check to extend copyright terms right when copyright in works first published in the 1920s is about to expire. This hypothetical bill would extend the U.S. copyright term by 30 additional years, to the life of the last surviving author plus 100 years (for works first published in 1978 or later that are not made for hire) or 125 years (for other works). Congress would rationalize it as a "harmonization" to Mexico's life-plus-100 copyright term, just as it rationalized the CTEA as a "harmonization" to the European Union's life-plus-70 copyright term.