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."

Comments

not going to work

[stonewallred]

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.

Re:not going to work

[jellomizer]

You don't need 100% success to have a victory. Sure people will still do it, but if you don't make it easy for them to do it less people will go ahead and do it any ways. If you make file sharing so hard that only the geeks can do it. Then that is enough to stop all the non-geeks.

Re:not going to work

[CRCulver]

Exactly music is a service and should be treated as such, that's why I like to say I purchase tickets not albums.

And what about when the music cannot be taken around on tour? Not all music is performed by small bands that can go from venue to venue. There are for electronic works for tape created at places like IRCAM. Sometimes concerts are so costly to put on that ticket prices are unlikely to cover the expenses -- I've gone to hear music at concert halls where it's hard to believe that ticket sales even paid for the huge amount of people hired for the venue's coat check, let alone the orchestra.

Some amount of public subsidy and patronage is already present to support music that either can't be put on in concert, or isn't profitable to put on in concert. As it becomes increasingly less realistic for artists to expect payment for every copy made of their work, it's worth supporting public subsidy and patronage models at the same time as calling for people to buy tickets to see their favourite rock bands in concert.

Re:not going to work

[Skapare]

... causes the stuff not to work well and attracts people who like challenges to break your "protection"

At least for many, breaking the "protection" is not the goal ... making stuff work well is. If the people making DRM were to come up with a way that provided the "protection" they (claim) to desire, while also working well on every platform, there wouldn't be as much interest in "breaking" it.

As a user exclusively of FOSS platforms, I consider that every content provider that fails to make sure that my platforms are supported is a content provider that has no interest in revenues from me or other users of these platforms. As such, if WE somehow manage to access their content through means that don't involve any payment, I see no loss to the owner. They didn't have sufficient interest in our money to make an effort to get it. So it is by their own decision that they won't get revenue from us; now ours.

Re:not going to work

[manicb]

Trent Reznor is a very talented man. What about musicians who are weak performers while a genius in the studio? People who suffer from serious anxiety problems? People whose target demographic is small and distributed across the world? There are plenty of very capable live bands out there who are having trouble pulling in big enough crowds ends meet, and we're supposed to believe that every niche electronic act can put a show together and do the same?

Re:not going to work

[CAIMLAS]

It's a bit of a catch-22. Most of those bands would not exist without the immediate dispersal methods of file sharing: people aren't likely to plop any sum of money down on an 'unknown'.

Are they 'entitled' to profit from their ventures when people like them? No, they're not; that's not how it works in this world. Should they be compensated by those who like their work? Of course - if they want to continue to see the fruits of those people's labors (assuming those people are not content to work for free).

It's a trade-off of sorts. You can't have both bounty and high cost in a medium which is, essentially, free for the taking. Human nature doesn't allow for it (and I'd argue, laws to the contrary are immoral).

Re:not going to work

[countertrolling]

They can still get a contract to do studio work for soundtracks, advertising, etc. They can release one song and get you to pay for more if you like. All sorts of new options will pop up once the gates are broken down.

Re:not going to work

[shadowbearer]

  You put your best works out there and you take your chances.

  That's how it should be. Nobody - and especially not the middlemen - should be guaranteed a living by law.

SB

In other news

[DMiax]

Copyright infringement remains different from stealing. As in "we will stop stealing when you stop calling it stealing".

sneakernet filesharing

[Rob Bos]

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.

But they're making it easier

[Rix]

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.

Re:But they're making it easier

[tftp]

I think they will sacrifice the relatively free and open Internet we have today

In context of this article it won't do a thing. If you have thousands of students living together, they don't need Internet to trade songs. The horse - an exact digital copy - has left the barn long ago; MP3 codec and pocket-sized multi-gigabyte players just make it practical. There is a a huge mass of music out there - essentially everything is there - and if the government introduces artificial scarcity by clamping down on copying then students will make sure to copy and store *everything* they come across, even if they don't like the music - just because it may be harder to do in the future.

Internet is important only for geeks who don't meet anyone, ever. But such geeks are probably sophisticated enough to get what they need - the government will be using a pretty rough net; they can monitor standard ports, but they can't look into SCP traffic or decode everything that is posted in a.b.*.encrypted, or try to figure out why foo.o is 4 MB long and the linker says it's corrupted, while foo.c is just "void foo() {}" ...

Laws are being proposed to mandate spyware, which you can bet will also restrict the use of "dubious" alternative systems like Linux and OSS if they get passed

All the spyware in the world is useless on a computer that is not on the network. With prices of computers going down fast, it is not unreasonable to see more and more people having two computers - one for Internet and one without a network card. The government would need to set up a Computer Police to bust doors and search premises (since a 1 TB portable drive fits in a shirt pocket.)

Re:That's basically what we did

[bigstrat2003]

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?

My university is happy about our DC network.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Legal Downloading - 57 Resources

[Skapare]

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.

Why students piracy:

[Tei]

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.

Shock!

[Spad]

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.

at certain points in history

[way2trivial]

the entire legal system may bow down to one woman sitting on a bus.