Georgia College's New Policy — Reporting All P2P Users To the Police

An anonymous reader excerpts from an article at TorrentFreak: "Georgia's Valdosta State University has updated its network with software that can pinpoint students who use P2P software. The university is committed to stop file-sharing on its network even if that results in prison sentences for students. Offenders will be disciplined by the school and then handed over to the police, the university has announced." School policy is one thing ("don't use file-sharing software on our resource-constrained network, or we may kick you off"), but I suspect the police wouldn't appreciate the task of sorting out legal from illegal use of widespread, essentially neutral software tools. Update: 11/15 18:27 GMT by T : Reader (and VSU alumnus) Matt Baker contacted the school; he reports that the school's IT director Joe Newton in response flatly denied the claims in the TorrentFreak article, and says the school hasn't installed such P2P tracking software, and doesn't hand students over the police, and says instead "I cannot foresee that we would ever do so." Thanks, Matt.

Comments

Re:Isn't this going to get expensive?

[DrgnDancer]

I dunno, there are a LOT of WoW and CoD players out there. Especially on a college network. With Cataclysm set to release in a month, and CoD just released (Hence needing to be patched most likely, games being what they are) it seems to me that there's probably a lot of legitimate P2P traffic on a university network right now. Gigs and gigs worth per client in WoW's case. I think my computer has downloaded something like 5 or 6 gigabytes worth of patches and preloads (They're making Cataclysm available for direct download rather than making you go to the store and buy a copy) in the last month or two with another 3-4 gigs expected before Dec 7. Then probably another 500MB to a gig in patches to fix the stuff that didn't scale like they thought it would.

Re:Isn't this going to get expensive?

[LambdaWolf]

You beat me to the punch on this reply, but since I had already typed up some back-of-the-envelope calculations, here they are.

World of Warcraft has around 12 million subscribers according to Wikipedia. The past couple of months it's been pushing out updates in anticipation of the Cataclysm expansion. Let's round the size of those updates to 5GB (although they may well be closer to 6GB by now). Perhaps not every subscriber is actively playing and has downloaded those updates, but they'll be outweighed by the active players with two copies of the client software (desktop and laptop, or work and home), so let's underestimate the number of updated client programs as 12 million.

You can divide World of Warcraft players roughly into two categories: the majority who let the game client automatically update itself using the BitTorrent protocol; and the minority who prefer to manage their patch downloads manually using BitTorrent. The set of players who pay enough attention to download their patches manually but choose FTP over the more convenient BitTorrent is minuscule. So we can safely estimate the portion of patch downloads that use a P2P protocol as 100%.

12 million subscribers times 5GB per subscriber is 60 million gigabytes of legitimate P2P throughput. And that's just getting ready for Cataclysm this autumn. There must have been several hundred million gigabytes more with the last two expansions and over the life of the game, to say nothing of Starcraft II (huge pre-loads of the entire client!) or other game companies than Blizzard (gasp!).

So, indeed, 60 million gigabytes != all but "almost every single byte of it". Even if piracy does account for a lot, even a majority, of P2P traffic, it does have a nontrivial legitimate usage that Internet users have a right to.