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."

Comments

Or...

[jellomizer]

They could use the money and get more bandwidth.

Re:Or...

[Brian Gordon]

You try living at college for 4 years without using the internet for anything personal.

Re:Or...

[theaveng]

Or...

Limit bandwidth access to just 128 kbit/s per dormroom. Although it's technically possible to do P2P sharing at that speed, most students won't bother, and that reduces the necessity to police the lines to almost nothing. More importantly that speed is still fast enough to hear streaming radio, access youtube, and/or check class websites.

If the students complain, and they will, advise them that the college internet is only meant to be used for learning, not for stealing movies or tv shows. Also advise them they might want to consider off-campus housing next year; then they can buy 6000 kbit/s internet if that's what they want.

Re:Or...

[Dan667]

Nice call there, except not everyone is stealing when they use the internet. If you are doing any work on big data projects like astrophysics, etc you would use a lot of bandwidth

Sony, EMI, Warner Bros, and Universal are stealing from Education, Tax Payers, and Musicians. Feel free to spread that.

Re:Or...

[Anonymous Coward]

> stealing movies or tv shows

Please stop repeating this old bullshit. People copying information from another people, people passing information along to their fellow men are not stealing. They are exchanging information, like people, you know, have always done. You and your alike comming along, calling some of this information (in others people possesion) their "intellectual property" and trying to censor free information exchange between free people in order to make a buck borders on fascism.

Stop this renaming propaganda bullshit already.

Re:Or...

[lattyware]

So, you are saying everyone using more than 128k is a pirate?
Yeah. I don't agree.

Re:Or...

[Jeremy Erwin]

Correct. And for those who are not stealing, they don't need any more than 128 kbit/s line. That's MORE than enough speed for emailing text or accessing websites. Heck, I access websites using a 50k phoneline, and it works just fine. Why a student "needs" (keyword) more than 128k makes no sense to me.

So, when your OS provider decides to push a 300 Megabyte upgrade at you, what do you do?

128K also isn't enough for live video. Youtube extensively buffers at that speed, and the quality suffers quite a bit. Consider microscopy. Often with even the most well prepared samples, the salient details can be difficult to discern from the background. If bandwidth considerations result in extensive artifacts, those small details all but disappear.

This argument is simply a case of "back in my day, we trudged ten miles in the snow, uphill to and from school."

Re:Or...

[xaxa]

When I went to college all I had was a 28 kbit/s line, and I survived all four years.

Presumably that was before the widespread use of Facebook, MSN Messenger, Skype, iTunes, Google Documents, email, flash games, YouTube, video on demand services, online shopping, web forums, etc, etc.

When I was 14 (I'm now 22) I didn't have a mobile phone, but all my friends did and I was left out quite often because of it.

Re:Or...

[theaveng]

>>>Except stealing fundamentally requires you to deprive the original owner of their property, which copyright infringement does not.

Yeah, but you can also steal a man's labor - which is why so many people joined Abolition movements in the early 1800s. Think about it: Would you be happy if, at the end of the week, your employer declares bankruptcy and doesn't pay your for the last two weeks/80 hours worth of work? Copyright infringement IS the same thing. It's theft of labor (an artist works to create a song; you take the product for your own enrichment).

Re:Or...

[b3m87]

You keep calling this internet 'free'. I'm pretty sure part of my 40k tuition goes to paying for that internet. No one cares that you use a 50k internet connection. Seriously, no one. Just because you are ancient and were forced to use such slow speeds does not mean that we should be punished. That is like hey I only got 3 television channels when I was growing up and thats all you need. So instead of getting 150 you should only get 3. Of course we only need 128kbs, but why should we settle for that when we are able to get over 1MBS. Please just go away.

Re:Or...

[Joce640k]

They could spend it on Lawyers and tell the RIAA to go screw itself.

Numbers are fun

[svendsen]

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.

Re:Numbers are fun

[Etrias]

In a way, $100,000 isn't much for a university...any university really. Salary costs alone would eat up this amount quickly.

No, this $100,000 is likely coming out of small campus programs who are lucky to have a budget. If it's being routed out of the overall tech budget, chances are that's the computer lab upgrade budget or other small, but needed programs that could really use that money. Seems a shame that money isn't being used better.

Re:Numbers are fun

[dreamchaser]

My wife has worked for more than one University and let me tell you that the waste across the board is horrendous. This is just a drop in the bucket but yet another example of short sighted wasteful spending. Meanwhile, tuition continues to go up at a rate that greatly outpaces core inflation.

Re:Numbers are fun

[seanellis]

No. $100K is still $100K whether it's 10% of $1M or 0.1% of $100M.

That $100K/yr will pay for tuition for how many students? 2 or 3 in proper subjects? (What are US tuition rates, anyway?) IMO, that's much more worth having than some warm body propping up Britney Spears's bottom line.

And if this is "many" colleges, that's a lot of kids who could get college scholarship, who aren't.

Are the US taxpayers happy to have their education tax dollars being spent on this, instead of on educating additional students?

Pennies in Legal Compliance

[mpapet]

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.

Re:Pennies in Legal Compliance

[gooman]

the average slashdot reader continues to buy new DVD's and pay absurd monthly video content fees that directly support the RIAA

Those purchases directly support the MPAA. Just as evil, but a different group.

That's only 1 FTE

[petes_PoV]

$100k buys you about one full time person. When you add in all the extra costs (healthcare, faciities etc) on top of their pay.

On that basis it's hard to see how they could do a proper job for less.

Re:That's only 1 FTE

[Free the Cowards]

The question is not whether they could do a proper job for less. The question is whether they should be doing this job at all.

Only 100,000 a year?

[A Name Similar to Di]

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?

Re:Only 100,000 a year?

[konohitowa]

In as much as I suspect that few here will want to hear your opinion (modding should indicate whether I'm right about that), I was hoping to find something along those lines.

My first thought when I read the headline was "big deal". When you consider the cost of a private education, $100k at a private institution is trivial. The government takes that much from me every year, and I figure the same people up in arms about the P2P cost wouldn't shed a single tear over my tax bill. Although at least the institutions can do it by choice, whereas my options all involve shedding myself of income.

Re:Chop off students' hands

[mathx314]

In a capitalist society, destroying one's wealth is essentially mutilation. And that's precisely what the *AAs do (and thus why universities spend >$100k to protect themselves).

Exactly.

[plasmacutter]

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.

Re:Exactly.

[plasmacutter]

this is not true with universities. They have massive internet throughput, and if they apply DSL speed policies to each residence hall connection, there would be no issue with bandwidth hogs.

As for the other ISP's used in your rationalization, they need to INCREASE.. THEIR... CAPACITY. You don't see any other manufacturer engage in rationing when they reach plant capacity. They add wings to their plant or build a new one.

Not to mention that we have to respond to p2p notices. At our school, we get so many notices that one full-time staffer (at $40k/year salary--with benefits, the cost goes up to around $55-60k/year) devoted to working with issues related to the DMCA. That's not insignificant.

100k a year to censor student lines and deny them the right to civil disobedience (and to face the possible consequences thereof) against abusive corporate interests, or a couple more staff members. Hmm..

Did your university also refuse to provide computer networks because that would require you hire IT staff?

How about sports fields because you'd have to increase grounds keeping budgets?

What makes the MAFIAA so special. Welcome to the real world where costs increase occasionally.

If we didn't discourage p2p using technological means, it may well require more staff, as I assume that the notifications would increase.

Oh NO!! you'd have to do your jobs instead of screwing the students on the MAFIAA's behest!!!

And most of the people who have to do the grunt work of the DMCA enforcement at the university level (again, at least here) really hate every aspect of dealing with it, and really wish that the RIAA/MPAA would just go away.

So instead, you subject your students to the great firewall of china at their behest, inconveniencing them much more (especially wow players) than your staff, who should be doing their jobs. (the jobs people like me paid 30k/yr after aid to do)

Re:Obligatory quote, I suppose

[theaveng]

Good post.

Another example on a more-personal level: I have a credit card that gives me 5% off gasoline and food. It's only ~50 cents per fillup or 5 cents per hamburger, which is no big deal, but those pennies quickly accumulate. In just this year alone, I've received $300 in rebates. That's enough money to pay three months worth of electricity bills.

Small amounts add-up to big amounts. Small wastes add-up to huge wastes & internal corruption.

Real problem is absurdity

[jasmak]

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.

Re:Chop off students' hands

[cliffski]

I see.
so if a student gets fined for breaking the law, that's evil mutilation?
But if you steal someone else's hard work and put them out of business, that's your fucking right?

Grow up.

What about Google?

[hostguy2004]

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.

Re:Obligatory quote, I suppose

[theaveng]

I *never* carry a balance. I don't want to pay interest.