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

Any forms of file-sharing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this related to any forms? What about downloading cc music or shows and isos of linux?

Re:Any forms of file-sharing?

[Shakrai]

Referral to the police station is of very quesitonable legality.

Uhh, referral to the police is foolish and a waste of time but it's not of "questionable legality". I can refer anything I want to the police. Doesn't mean they will investigate it or do anything but it's not a crime to tell the police about a civil affair.....

Re:Any forms of file-sharing?

[burris]

You don't have to make money. The No Electronic Theft Act of 1998 changed the definition of "financial gain." 17 USC 101 now reads:

The term "financial gain" includes receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value, including the receipt of other copyrighted works.

In other words, now they can go after people trading. I don't doubt that a prosecutor could convince a jury that the ratio system on a Torrent site, for instance, shows that the defendant expected to receive other copyrighted works in exchange for continuing to seed whatever it is they downloaded.

Re:Any forms of file-sharing?

[Ihmhi]

That might be a good "I am Spartacus" situation.

If college students are good at any one thing (besides getting wasted and pulling all-nighters) is raising hell for a good cause. Why not teach a few hundred students how to use Bittorrent and have them download Linux ISOs and other legitimate, legal stuff nonstop to, in effect, flood the system and make something like that completely ineffective. Or better yet, maybe a student could create a DDOS software variant where a bunch of computers would connect peer-to-peer on the college's network and trade junk data between each other via Bittorrent, Gnutella, and other similar filesharing protocols.

Isn't this going to get expensive?

[RogueyWon]

Ok, I'm no expert on the US legal situation, but what's to prevent a situation like this from happening:

1) Student installs 100% legal copy of World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2 or any other game which uses a P2P updater system on their PC in their dorm room.

2) Game does its P2P stuff to get its patches.

3) College spots P2P activity and calls police.

4) Police charge college administrators with wasting police time.

5) Student sues college.

Like it or not, P2P isn't just about illegal filesharing. Yes, I'd fully accept that most P2P traffic is illegal, but a blanket policy like this just seems doomed to (probably expensive) failure.

Re:Isn't this going to get expensive?

[Junior J. Junior III]

End result: College bans games. Games aid terrorism by masking real illegal activity in a shroud of legitimate traffic; they are therefore illegitimate by proxy.

Re:Isn't this going to get expensive?

[icebraining]

No, they're not guests, they're paying users of that network - that's part of what tuition pays for. Are you a "guest" of your ISP's network? Do they have the right to go through your data? Then why is it any different in this case?

Re:Isn't this going to get expensive?

[Shakrai]

I'm unaware of any 4th amendment legal precedent that the government is not allowed to monitor the traffic on its own network.

I'm going to refer to your post the next time somebody suggests that we need a municipal owned last mile to "fix" our broken broadband market.....

I bought some lighter fluid...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you point me to the appropriate police department to turn myself in as a possible arsonist?

So

[Anonymous Coward]

You're young, living on your own for the first time, and the place that's supposed to be teaching you stuff announces that at the first sign of a misstep they'll "discipline" you and then hand you over to the police for a second helping of same, with a permanent record attached to boot.

What a wonderful way to grow up.

Re:not necessarily a bad policy

[betterunixthanunix]

the student wins: the police will mostly ignore the pirating

Until it turns out to be a student who runs a blog that criticizes the police department, or some politician wants to run on a "tough on crime" platform, or some police officer whose cousin works for the RIAA. Relying on the police to not prosecute people who are reported to them for breaking the law is not something I would do.

Mass-downloading of legal software

[captainpanic]

Students should just start downloading legal p2p software... at a massive scale.

Make sure that the university and the police department are getting overworked from false claims of illegal downloading.

It's a peaceful, harmless and non-violent way of teaching stupid people that p2p is not always illegal.