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?