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File Sharing Remains a Perk of College Life
An anonymous reader points out a story on the effect of a new law on file sharing on campuses — in short, it may not make much difference. "Students who are about to graduate often hand down the tricks of stealing music and movies to the next senior class. ... At the College of New Jersey, that means surreptitiously finding a new home each year for a computer holding an enormous directory of illegal files on the campus. ... The machine runs software called Direct Connect, which lets people on a local network easily trade files among their hard drives in a way that is usually undetectable to anyone outside the network. ... Educause recently unveiled a website with information about the new regulations. It provides case studies from six 'role-model campuses,' listing the steps they are taking to combat piracy. Another page lists 57 legal sources of music and movies on the Web. But when asked which campuses have forged new policies in reaction to the law, Educause officials were unable to name any."
You are never going to stop folks from trading files. All you can do is try and make it difficult. And that brings its own problems because it usually causes the stuff not to work well and attracts people who like challenges to break your "protection". I believe the model of charging less would work better.
Copyright infringement remains different from stealing. As in "we will stop stealing when you stop calling it stealing".
If nothing else, there's always USB keys. Now pushing 128GB. My coworkers and I trade entire television shows pretty regularly.
Who needs fileservers? Sneakernet is becoming more and more efficient.
The Napster/Grokster lawsuits spawned BitTorrent. Killing suprnova caused a bloom of (better) torrent aggregator sites.
Excessive use of antibiotics just gets you antibiotic resistant strains.
why are these colleges worrying about piracy of movies and music, does society benefit from the creation of the vacuous nonsense that is entertainment? does humanity progress by the creation of these petty distractions? No? then screw them, why should we worry about the moral integrity surrounding superfluous crap.
At my school, we just used SMB shares. This article reminds me of the time we were discussing the possibility of building a machine to replace that of a graduating senior, just so the location of his massive Simpsons collection wouldn't change. I also remember very fondly when I heard in conversation that my machine was down over the weekend - from a person I had never met before, and who didn't know when he mentioned it that he was talking about my machine.. When your computer is known by people before you yourself are, that's an achievement. :)
So really, all this article has accomplished is to fill my Sunday afternoon with waves of happy nostalgia. Was I supposed to be shocked and outraged?
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
At my university (40k students), we have a DC network and the IT here are not just aware of it, but some of the IT guys are the same guys who maintain it. Our university is happy to look the other way because the sharing is virtually undetectable outside the network, and we have plenty of bandwidth in network to move gig files around in seconds while not compromising the connection to the outside world. The less we share outside the DC network, the less letters they get from the RIAA (which they already ignore for the most part).
By the way, its articles like this that shed light on these networks, which we certainly don't need.
If we mark off those resources for legal downloading (in the "comprehensive list of alternatives" link at the Educause site) that still don't work with FOSS platforms, how many remain? I know at least Magnatune is among them.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Students don't have much money (much less than people with jobs), but still have the same needs, created by the industry and our dynamic culture. The only way for these people to fullfill these needs is to piracy. I don't condone piracy.. but I have to say that the other option is frustration.
I don't theres any solution. But theres also no damage either: these people will not buy anyway. Once these people finish his studios and get a job, these same people will start buying things again, wen buying is easier.
Let students warez his music, there are things more important for us.
-Woof woof woof!
Students trying to get stuff for free? Never!
I had a friend at uni who used to buy packaged foodstuffs and then send them back to the "If you're not completely satisfied" address with a fictional complaint. 9 times out of 10 he'd get a crate of said product by way of compensation; he survived for 3 years, barely paying for anything he ate or drank in this manner and you're amazed that people are swapping music without paying for it?
If any single group of people can find a way to get things without paying for them, it's student. Intelligent, poor, lots of free time = win.
the entire legal system may bow down to one woman sitting on a bus.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
" Or do you actually believe it's a right that's being wrongly suppressed?"
Until public domain is taken back from all the IP industries piracy is one of the few things we can due to resist the corporate dictatorship. We have closed codebases for abandonware that can't be repaired and the whole concept of software licensing is fraudulent to begin with since no one really owns their software and that should have been illegal to begin with to "outlaw" ownership of things your customers buy.
I have to ask: do you see filesharing to be kind of like pot-smoking, in that "some other people say it's wrong, but it isn't hurting anyone else, so who cares?" Do you believe it's wrong, but participate anyway? Or do you actually believe it's a right that's being wrongly suppressed?
If it's either of the first of those, why do you think it is that nobody challenges the ethics of these private servers? Do you not have any peers whose moral code says "No, filesharing is wrong, you guys are ripping off my favorite band, I'm turning you in to the ethics board?" Are you're saying that really, out of the thousands of students your university, and of every other university situation you are aware of, that not a single student complains about the inappropriateness of it?
I'm not trying to fish for snitches or get anyone in trouble with this question, but I'm just pretty much surprised that nobody complains. Not even the sons or daughters of (RI|MP)AA execs or artists, whose very education might be paid for by the media being copied?
I think that's pretty much reason that everybody around here seems so confident that the RIAA and their ilk are going to lose in the end -- for the vast majority of people, sharing of "trivial" stuff like music really isn't a bad thing; at most, it's just sort of "wink-wink-nudge-nudge wrong".
Even the industry's attempts to demonize it (like happened with marijuana) are ineffective, because it's something that most people have already done themselves, so they know in their gut that it's a natural and healthy thing. The histrionic pronouncements and clumsy flailing about by the RIAA may even weaken their case, as they simply don't ring true.
The pop music industry's traditional emphasis on trying to promote mega-stars may have hurt their case too, as it's hard to feel very guilty about copying a song by someone who's obviously mega-rich and flaunts their excessive lifestyle (and in many cases seems far more concerned with the lifestyle than the music). If it were humble local bands who were coming out against copying, maybe there would be at few pangs of guilt -- but AFAICT, it's the relatively unknown bands who are most likely to support sharing of their songs.
We live, as we dream -- alone....