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

[YrWrstNtmr]

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.

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

[st0rmshad0w]

Wasn't Nine Inch Nail's first stuff all originally done by Reznor in the studio?

Hire a band for crying out loud.

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

[YourExperiment]

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.

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

[DavidTC]

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.

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".

Re:In other news

[1336]

"Copying is not theft.
Stealing a thing leaves one less left
Copying it makes one thing more;
that's what copying's for."

Source: http://questioncopyright.org/minute_memes/copying_is_not_theft

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.

That's basically what we did

[IICV]

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.

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?

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

[russotto]

If you think the pirate community is going to overcome the entire weight of the legal profession, the political players and the big money spinners through sheer force of arrogant denial, then I suspect some time in the next two or three years, you are going to learn a painful lesson. I'm only sorry that quite a few innocent people are going to be deeply inconvenienced when the remaining healthy tissue in the limb is sacrificed to be sure the disease is contained.

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.

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.)

Sneakernet and LAN, bro

[dcposch]

I'm a sophomore undergraduate at a relatively large university in California, and the volume of filesharing I see my classmates engage in is enormous.

Most of the discussion about filesharing (here on Slashdot and elsewhere) seems to focus on P2P, but in my experience BitTorrent/Gnutella/P2P darknets are just the tip of the iceberg.

The vast majority of the filesharing volume I see here is by sneakernet and private servers. The house I live in has a server with upwards of 3 TB of movies and music; all of our residents can log in.

I've seen people merge their own several-GB collections with the collection on the server. Last year, I lived in a frosh dormitory; there was no server, but it was common for people to lend each other iPods or merge media collections on each other's laptops. That kind of sharing takes a few minutes to transfer a few GB--it's on an entirely different plane from the type of sharing the RIAA and MPAA focus on, transferring one song or one movie at a time over P2P.

Incidentally, the media server setup I described is not unique to the house I live in--most of the houses and some of the dorms at my university have one; nor is it unique to colleges and universities--the startup I interned at two years ago had one, too.

So when the RIAA/MPAA sues a single mom for her kid's Kazaa downloads, I see it as beating a dead horse. The real sharing is on the scale of GB and TB at a time, not individual songs. On the rare occasion when I do find something missing from the media libraries I have access to, I'll torrent it using PeerGuardian to block corporate IPs, so I'm unlikely to show up on any logs the RIAA keeps.

By focusing their legal efforts on P2P users, I think that the media cartels may have drawn out the battle while losing the war. Yes, we're more reticent now to use BitTorrent. But we've merely moved to faster, more local, less traceable forms of sharing.

Re:Sneakernet and LAN, bro

[plover]

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?

Re:Sneakernet and LAN, bro

[dcposch]

I think it's not a question of ethics, and here's why: you can't share a secret with a million people and expect them to keep it.

The idea that you can "lend" something that consists purely of a stream of bits (such as a song or video) to someone, or sell it to them while preventing them from sharing it, is a myth. (Software is a bit different, because software is more than just bits; for example, MS does have partial success in getting people to pay for Windows by denying pirates the aspects of Windows that are a service, such as Windows Update.) It's fundamentally impossible; this manifests itself, for example, in the way DRM schemes consistently turn out to be weak.

I think that actions can be moral, and they can be legal; fortunately, there is strong correlation between the two. However there are actions that are legal but not moral, and there are actions that are morally acceptable but not legal. I think that filesharing falls into the latter category. I think that most people on Slashdot would agree with me: copyright law is the result of corporations' desire for guaranteed profit, not necessarily the result of artist's needs and certainly not a reflection of moral truths.

Information wants to be free. I see piracy as a temporary condition, a response to a legal system that's currently in deep denial. The sooner we fix it, the better, both for artists and for consumers.

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.