Slashdot Mirror
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."
That's basically what we did when I went to college. Someone would host the DC++ server, and everyone else would connect to it and share files over it. You had to have 1 GB of shared files to join.
ResNet didn't give a shit, and in fact for a couple of years the guy who hosted the server was about as high up in ResNet as a student can get. We were using a ton of bandwidth, but as long as it was on the internal on-campus network they didn't care. In fact, I heard that we were kind of wink-and-nudge supported by the actual network administrators - college students are going to pirate stuff anyway, so they'd far prefer we do it on the local network, and leave the gathering of new materials to guys who'll use a VPN to a dedicated usenet box.
Then it's not worth listening to.
Bull.
Mike Oldfield. Multiple instruments, multiple tracks, all played by one individual. You cannot do that live.
Now...if you want to say "he sucks", that's ok, you can do that. But other peoples tastes differ.
You are never going to stop folks from trading files.
I don't know. You could always name and shame a particular college on the front page of Slashdot, citing the exact method that the students use to share files. That'd probably do enough to drop a few people in the shit.
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?
John
You think they'll sacrifice computers and the internet to save the music and movie industry? Sorry, there's a lot of them who would like to, but it's just not going to happen. And the legal profession will fight for any side; they're hired guns in this, not interested parties.
I, OTOH, am on neither 'side', but think copyright is dead. Not that it 'should' be...that it is.
The practical fact is, without some degradation per copy, and/or high costs to copy, there can be no such thing as copyright
If things are infinitely copyable over 'free' channels, with no work per copier, and almost no work to originally copy...that's it. it's over.
This isn't some 'Copyright should be dead', it's not any sort of moral judgment at all. Hell, for all I know, the death of copyright will cause a cultural disaster. It's just a fact.
Copyright was created to stop people from taking a work, spending time and money, and reselling it. That's the point, that's what it manages to stop. It stops the business of copying, when copying had to be a business because no one was out there making their own 35mm film copies, and even if they were, the echos of those copies would quickly disappear as the copies got worse over time...and no one would fund that without any sort of profit possibility, which exposed them to legal sanctions as any illegal business would be.
Without that effort required...well...
Imagine a hypothetical world where sex was a heavily regulated industry, and, for some reason, took an amazing amount of prep work and skill. Certain people were allowed to charge for it, and did.
Others operated outside the law. Sometimes large illegal brothels would spring up and provide mostly identical sex (Piracy rings.), and eventually get shut down by the law, and sometimes people would setting up crappy locations and manage to provide really bad sex. (Aka, analog copies.)
And now imagine someone figured out how to provide 100% identical sex using a standard bed everyone had in their house, as long as someone who had had sex at some time showed them how.
And now imagine someone figured out how to copy stuff exactly using the standard computer everyone had in their house, as long as someone had a copy on a computer somewhere.
Copyright is dead, or at least has been fatally wounded and will be dead soon. It's coasting right now on the fact that a) they own congressmen, and b) citizens are amazingly apathetic. But I suspect in, very soon, the laws will change, simply because people are not following them. I am not, in any sense, arguing this is a 'good' thing, just a 'true' thing.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?