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Many Universities Spending $100K/Year Enforcing P2P Rules
Scott Jaschik writes "A new study documents just how much money colleges are spending on enforcing P2P rules through software license fees, hardware, and other costs. Many private universities are spending more than $100,000 a year — a major allocation of funds. An article in Inside Higher Ed explains the study and its findings."
They could use the money and get more bandwidth.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
1) Scare congress into passing tough new regulations on colleges.
2) Get colleges to pay for your copyright enforcement.
3) Profit! Maybe...
The problem is that even after you do all this, do you actually make more money?
After RTFA it didn't actually mention percentage of total budget that univ. are spending on this. If its 50% of their total budget it is an issue, if its .000000001 how much of an issue is it really? If they are looking to save money there are probably a lot easier ways to do so with much bigger savings.
Sorry, I don't believe this. I do the exact same thing for large networks and it doesn't cost anywhere near that much, what I think they did was *any* software or hardware which was used in the process was added to the total cost.
Ordinary IDS/IPS which just happens to also be used to detect/stop P2P? Add full cost of the solution.
These stats are shady.
I would agree that a University could simply subscribe to a service like Ruckus to tempt students away from using P2P. But then what about movies? What about Software?
Corporations with interest in those pieces of IP will still have a complaint. Maybe from a risk P.O.V 100k is cheap. I don't know. I'm not a friggin ichioligist or whatever thinks about profit v. risk.
Oh, what about legitimate P2P uses? I guess screw them. No one has to fear abusing or losing legitimacy.
My university both supports and is against bittorrent. There are posters that say we shouldn't use it, while at the same time there are instructions on how to securely use bittorrent on a university website. Guess it's because we have one of the co-creators of bittorrent on campus.
Reality check: this is peanuts.
How much does the university pay for all kinds of other legal compliance? How many lawyers on staff?
There's no doubt this is a ridiculous compliance issue. But the average slashdot reader continues to buy new DVD's and pay absurd monthly video content fees that directly support the RIAA. Dog forbid I mention watching less television or consuming fewer media conglomerate products.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Went into the campus computer lab to find that the entire room was sitting on live IPs. No NAT, and when I shut off the XP firewall, I was able to ping the machine from the Internet. Naturally, I was logged in with local admin rights.
Fire up Apache and plug in your external HD chock full o' goodies and away you go...
Speed tests showed 80Mb down and 90Mb up. Yes, life must be nice sitting on a phat backbone with a class-B to waste. And we have to wonder why we're running out of IPv4 space?
It's a bit misleading in my experience.
I would say that the services and equipment which are used to fight or support or enforce P2P issues are easily at the $100k level in larger universities.
However, the equipment and services are also used for other purposes such as regulating bandwidth usage, fighting viruses and worms, and limiting network access to only members of the University community.
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
all legitimate educational institution computers (not college student owned machines) are exempt from software copyrights. Everyone wins- ms raises another generation to use their software and be dependent on it, and price to entry becomes lower, increasing education levels around the country.
On that basis it's hard to see how they could do a proper job for less.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
So they hired one guy to watch the network. I'm guessing most universities spend 10x that on gardening alone... why is the writer up in arms?
Chris: BOOBIES!!
Lois: Chris, That's enough! Well I'm sure glad to be out of there
Peter: You said it Lois, what those people are doing just ain't natural.
Chris: BOOBIES!
Lois: Did you hear me young man?
Meg: I don't know what the big deal was? I thought they were nice.
Chris: BOOBIES!!
Lois: Peter?
Peter: Do it.
(Everybody besides Chris puts on sunglasses and Lois reveals the Neuralizer from Men in Black, and uses it on Chris)
Lois: Did you have fun at the circus today Chris?
Chris: Elephants are bigger in person!
Hmm..
The scary thing is that the **AA would probably offer to police their networks for free, and recoup their costs via lawsuits.
Seriously, you want ruthless compliance then mutilate people who violate it. And while we're at it let's execute pornographers in the town square. In fact let's make all crimes capital crimes. What about all the GOOD things they do in North Korea?
Not really. You download linux distros through the bittorrent protocol. You watch TV using TVUPlayer, which is a P2P software. I can mention a lot of legitimate uses in *workplace* (including academia). The uses you mention are recreational uses.
New Economic Perspectives
They are hiring either up to two warm bodies per school to deal with P2P rules enforcement? This is assuming a school that pays one guy $100k/year, or two guys for $50k/year. Hell, make it three, the manager for $50K, two worker bees for $25K.
I graduated more than a decade ago, and my campus had about 10,000 students. Even back then two people would not be able to do jack squat. Two guys could maybe handle this kind of gig at a faculty level, but campus wide?
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
Just enroll 2.5 more students and you'll have an extra 100K
Barack Obama said: "I know that it may not be the direction you want to see IP laws go in but at least we're creating jobs for Joe the Network Admin with good health benefits."
John McCain explains: "I'd hate to see young college students go astray when there is so much to look forward to. Let's try to keep a level head and co-op these human resources with other areas of the campus IT departments. It won't be as wasteful and everyone wins in the end."
Both sides agree that this is money well spent and with that in mind the Court Jester-in-waiting does a happy little dance as he hopes his buffoonery will please his new king, whomever that may be.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
This is a really stupid example. If a university is spending $100K/year on .. well .. useless crap, then they can also probably afford to spend $300 on a hard disk. Run a local mirror for the popular distros. That pretty much obsoletes p2p, speeds up the end user experience, and reduces their use of the outside pipes.
Local caching beats the shit out of p2p every time.
I would agree that a University could simply subscribe to a service like Ruckus to tempt students away from using P2P. But then what about movies? What about Software?
Corporations with interest in those pieces of IP will still have a complaint. Maybe from a risk P.O.V 100k is cheap. I don't know. I'm not a friggin ichioligist or whatever thinks about profit v. risk.
Oh, what about legitimate P2P uses? I guess screw them. No one has to fear abusing or losing legitimacy.
Or they could give people the right to exercise their own moral prerogatives. I mean, it's not as if universities should be open bastions of free thought, or anything.
Explain to me why anyone should pay housing fees just to be censored by completely unrelated corporate interests.
If they want to sue students, hand over the information under the DMCA, and no more liability exists. Simple really.
This crap takes "in loco parentis" too far.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Considering private universities have been known to charge easily 20 to 35k a year per student, this really doesnt seem like that big of a deal, 20-35k times 3 or 4 thousand... this wouldnt even make a dent in it!
You Repugs are going to lose, and lose big. Butch up and deal with it, kid.
Am dealing with it. Thinking about 2010. Have a lot to do by then. This is but one part of a new global economic vision to deal with the Democrats reactionary socialism.
This is my sig.
Colleges are put in the very uncomfortable position of ISP for their residential students.
and they should behave like an ISP and stop filtering crap for unrelated corporate interests.
Just follow the law and provide information if served with proper papers, and let the students *gasp*, make their own choices and take responsibility for them.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
$200K salary and $300K office, staff overhead. The prof is expected to pul in that much in grants.
I haven't been keeping up on tuition rates, but the summary specifically states "private universities." When I was college-age (mid-to-late 90s), private university cost approximately $25,000, including room and board. So, this would be the equivalent of 4 students out of their entire student body.
I *think* current rates are closer to $40,000 per year. So, this is 2.5 students (would hate to be that .5 guy).
So, for an individual, this is quite a bit of money. But, for a large organization with pretty significant funding, probably not all that much.
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
my school's
-gun club budget: $17,000
-SCUBA club budget: $11,000
-Rifle Team Budget: %9,800
-Robotics team budget: $30,000
-Efficient Vehicles budget: $25,000
-autocross club budget: ~$20,000
mind you, most of these are CLUBS. the quoted $100,000 is nothing to most schools large enough to have a problem.
Why not just make a movie/cd rental section in the student library? I'm sure 100,000 a year is enough money to purchase several copies of the newly released movies and cds. and students could vote on new releases to see if the university should buy them or not
I recently graduated from Penn State and the real problem lies with the fact that the people in charge of discipline action have no idea what they are doing. They are not special tech administrators but instead send you to the Judicial affairs office for violations. I had my internet turned off for 2 weeks and could have gotten a disciplinary action from the school (such as suspension, expulsion, etc) because someone had apparently downloaded the shareware version of Dreamweaver from me. Yes I am talking about the 30 day trial. Until you get administrators that understand technology, you cannot be effective in this fight against student rights.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
This is no different to a whole range of things schools and universities have to spend money on because some of their students act like idiots.
Some idiots bring knives to school, so the school has to waste money on metal detectors.
Some idiots will send spam and viruses to any PC connected to the net, so the schools have to spend money on spam filtering and firewalls.
In these cases, we all realize the maniacs with knives or the bastards who send spam are the ones causing the school to have to deal with this shit.
For some reason, the irresponsible dorks who risk all sorts of crap by using a school network to copy copyrighted stuff are somehow the victims. Maybe if they spent some more time actually studying, they might get decent jobs and be able to buy the music they want?
Just a suggestion.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
$100K+ per college per year is more money than the sales of recorded product to the students would generate. Therefore the RIAA is getting paid twice: once through extortion ("we won't sue you for promoting piracy through providing high bandwidth...") and again through product sales to the students.
No wonder they want the current situation to continue.
The only real 'solution' is to convince students to wean themselves from RIAA/MPAA product. This will probably prove next to impossible since young people have been conditioned from birth to consume RIAA/MIAA product.
One thing to watch out for is any collusion between Wackenhut or Corrections Corporation of America and the RIAA/MPAA. These people are the two largest private prison corporations in the USA. It would be in their interest to criminalize with prison sentences any copyright offence like downloading. They make money by holding people in prison: the more people held int their prisons, the more profit that they make. And they have a responsibility to their stockholders to maximize their profits. If laws are passed turning file downloading into prison offenses, you can be sure that Wackenhut and CCA had a lot to do with it because these kind of laws will deliver a new large source of raw materal for them to process for profit. They have already got a lock on the Black underclass youth, which is no longer a growing source of product for the private prison corporations. So if you download files, (and you do), then this means you. Don't get tricked into a prison sentence by the RIAA/MPAA because you won't survive an period in an American corporate prison.
These companies are the modern day equivalent of slave-traders. Whenever a law is proposed on the state level to increase the penalties for drug possession, often it is Wackenhut and CCA who are behind it, usually by providing most of the campaign funds for the person who introduced the bill. Students should demand that their colleges disinvest any shares that their college endowment fund has in either of these corporations.
I'm not paranoid, this stuff really happens this way. Just beware and don't be naive. Young American white people put too far much emphasis on music recordings for some unknown reason. They have been conditioned to believe that this is the core of their culture. Well, learn to break your conditioning, that's what you are going to college for. Learn to play a musical instrument and learn to make films from public domain plays and your own scripts using inexpensive cameras and digital video edit programs.
Thank you and please don't mod me down simply because you disagree. Learning to handle diverse viewpoints in a civilized manner is another reason why you are spending so much money to go to college.
As other posters have stated, that is not always an option to go off-campus. Bring that option to the dorms at the normal costs as off-campus housing.
No need to enrich those who'd have a captive market with off-campus housing.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Surely you just get mobile broadband via a USB modem stick? I can get one which runs at upto 7.2Mb/sec for $15/month (equivalent USD cost after rebates), with a 5Gb usage limit. Not sure if that kind of service has reached much of the US yet.
Didn't Google start up as a dorm room project?
At one point, Google was using half the college's bandwidth running their search bot. Something people should think about next time they say "limit bandwidth" or "6mbs" is not needed for anything other than downloading MP3s from P2P.
In Soviet Russia ^H^H^H America, The bank finances YOU!
Do they let people who live near by to stay at there own homes as I see legal issues with forcing them to pay for college owned apartments.
I currently have a child attending U. of Wisc. (/== private). Double your $40,000 and you're getting close. Ignoring her Starbucks card of course.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Oh, and while they're at it, they should *totally* cache youtube, magnatune, pandora, and every legal torrent!
Get over it; just because it *can* be used for evil doesn't mean it's bad. Technology is neither good nor bad. It's the use.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
Maximum speed within the residence halls (to encourage people to grab files, legal or otherwise, from someone else in the residence halls)
Speed to the rest of the university network is capped at whatever speed makes most sense
Traffic within the residence halls and out to the wider university network is 100% free (lecture notes and anything else they need)
Run a university provided mirror server for non-copyright-violating files that are large/popular (e.g. linux ISOs, Microsoft service packs, game updates, files available through MSDNAA etc) which is also free. Certain sites out in the wider world which are essential for certain students to access for their studies and which may require large bandwidth use can also be added to the free list if its deemed that they are only useful for legitimate university business.
Students then get a fixed amount of traffic to the internet at large every month as part of whatever it is they pay for living on campus. If they exceed that, they get restricted (e.g. speed down to 64kbps or so). If they need or want more, they can pay extra for it.
Legal Issues? Pshaw. The university can justify it on educational grounds. After all, 'university' is short for universitas magistrorum et scholarium-- a community of masters and scholars.
I consider "late night bull sessions" to be a small part of my college experience. If most people live off campus or (shudder) commute, there's less chance of that.
> and they should behave like an ISP and stop filtering crap for unrelated corporate interests.
The RIAA then sponsored a bill trying to get their federal funding cut off if they didn't do something about P2P. That provision was watered down, but they've still been told to, in effect, "do something" about the RIAA's problems.
Whether they want to or not.
If you consider...
UCLA received 55,000+ applications last year... and each carried with it a $60 non-refundable fee. That means in just application fees alone, $3.3 million dollars came in to UCLA. Now, if UCLA is spending $100k on fighting file sharing... I guess that means they only got $3.2 million profit off those applications.
Now, if it were more of a bumpkin school that only charged $25 per application... the first 4000 applicants would pay for this.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
So now the RIAA's demands have created a mandate to throttle a class of technologies.
I thought you were going to say a large figure. I mean, I work for a Big Ten school and $100K just isn't a lot of money to us. Its probably cheaper as a CYA measure more than anything else.
... in a completely sideways way. I'm a student at a university right now, and all on-campus residents have to use Cisco Clean Access to log in to the network to use the internet. This includes changes to your system, install their software, their antivirus, and doing everything they require of you. If you don't, the software detects the inconsistency and removes your internet access until it is remedied. This software, needless to say, is a resource hog and has been found to be pretty unstable on Vista. People complain. A lot. As a Linux user, I am spared all this hassle. Linux machines can't run Cisco, and as such are given a free pass to log onto the network. Whenever someone is complaining about Cisco, I happily offer to install Ubuntu on their machine for them to try out. Our local Linux group does the same. Keep on rockin, IT folks! You're doing an awesome job! (Note that they, of course, do not support Linux. It scares them...)
Perhaps large, state universities are spending $100,000/year on P2P enforcement.
But at your run-of-the-mill $2bn+ public university that's absolute chump change. They spend more watering the lawn.
In fact, that's probably the equivalent of ONE junior attorney in the general counsel's office. Or a couple of QoS handlers and a few techs to run them.
Message contains 1 attachment: spam.gif
... too much, if you divide it by months. Also needn't forget that complex hardware/software solution able to effectively detect and block various kinds of p2p traffic is costly. It turns out to be easier to spend $100k+ on preventing something illegal than being harassed by RIAA or like that.
Congratulations! Your plan has been accepted. Here are the new chart-topping hits!
And costs the school extra maintenance time, and the pay for someone to set that up, administrate it, and keep it up to date. Not to mention tech support, helping the students to use it as their package mirror.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
At my institution we have no residence so that probably mitigates the issue somewhat. We also aren't a US institution so that probably saves us too since our government hasn't gone retarded in this respect.
Our entire campus is fed by a 100Mb connection. We are pretty close to our ISP's POP which I surmise gets us a comparably awesome rate. The director says he gets a few calls from ISPs per year and all he does is quote our rate to them and they say "Can't do it".
We have only twice taken any kind of action against P2P users.
1) We have an edge device that shapes unencrypted P2P to a cap of 3Mb/s. Poorly. Turning on encryption goes through it like a hot knife through butter.
2) We had a single event which ended up in pretty significant network outages. P2P significantly contributed to exhausting the number of connections in the NAT table (it was kind of funny because the NOC actually brought IBM in to figure it out and they couldn't - I figured it out that afternoon while walking home). So I had the router report people who were using 300 or more connections and kicked them off. Then had the helpdesk refer them to me when they complained. Nice thing about this is that no accusation of P2P use was necessary. All we had to do is say: "You were making 300 connections to external machines. We feel this constitutes abuse of network resources.". When they asked "How could this happen". I'd rattle off a few reasons but when I came to "P2P programs like..." 90% of them started looking sheepish. We stopped doing this after a week or so by that time we had adjusted the NAT box (required a kernel parameter change so we couldn't do it right away).
According to our statistics we never use more than 20% of our connection. That's with virtually no restrictions.
Other institutions that I know of which *do* have a residence use a "bandwidth supply" method. Students have some supply of bandwidth that they can use over some fixed period (3MB/week or whatever) they can use that at an unlimited rate but after the 3MB is used up you are at some very low fixed rate (i.e. 64kb/s).
It will always be an arms race but a very odd one that pits technology against lawyers. Sometimes the lawyers win the battles but in the long run technology always crushes its opponents.
"These things can all take up a lot of bandwidth."
Entirely true. Which is yet another reason to not have thousands of P2P programs trashing the network.
What the OP is missing is that any money they might be saving by not chasing after P2P users would now be spent on bandwidth and on trying upgrade the infrastructure faster than the hogs can use it.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
still have money for this?
All of which is yet another reason to avoid having thousands of P2P programs trashing the network. Don't want them preventing you from doing your research, now do we?
What the OP is missing is that any money they might be saving by not chasing after P2P users would now be spent on bandwidth and on trying to upgrade the infrastructure faster than the hogs can use it.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Just think, if we didn't have a great plan coming from our messiah to help government fix health care, we wouldn't get the privilege of a routine physical costing $5000.00 due to similar waste.
You mean we'd have better care for less money. But then if you had a reality-based view of the world and voted for your own interests, you'd have your wingnut merit badge revoked on the spot.
from the god-bless-amerika dept.
Fixed.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
You can commute, but even then I believe there are strict guide lines to it. It is a private college, which means they tend to get the freedom to do what they want.
That is the reasoning that they tended to use. They said that dorms helped to create a community environment and foster some sort of academic experience. I don't know what sort of experience they were hoping to create, but I can guarantee you it was different than what they expected.