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?

[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.

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?

[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.

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.

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.

Valdosta State's rep in Jeopardy

[digitaldc]

Valdosta State was right up there with Harvard and Yale at the top of my applications list but seriously, who would even THINK of going there NOW? ;)

Criminal vs. Civil

[watermark]

I thought your run-o-the-mill copyright violation was a civil matter. Shouldn't they be reporting the students to the copyright holders?

Re:Parents will appreciate this

[TheGratefulNet]

the 'you must go to college' meme is slowly dying.

actually, it should. not everyone should be in college. furthermore, the 'thinking arts' that america uses to be known for is fading (overseas). the notion of going to school, doing your time in studies and having it pay back is a BROKEN SOCIAL CONTRACT and those of us already at-age know this ;(

if I had kids, I would not send them to college. I'd send them to a trade school where they work with their hands in some form (mechanic, plumber, electrician, capenter, etc). these are the outsource-immune jobs. they're less 'sexy' than IT work but IT work simply won't exist in this country when elementary school kids reach the workforce age. like I said, the social agreement of 'study hard and you will get a good job' is busted now and will be even more as time goes on. american 'thinkers' are something companies are now considering to be *too expensive*.

universities are VERY expensive and often don't pay for themselves (again, lack of jobs can make school a pure expensive and not ever by worth what you paid for).

and now you have universities being openly hostile to their students.

I would simply drop out (in fact, I did, back in my day) and get my own education. work experience matters more than a paper degree for most jobs in IT once you get beyond entry level.

the day where you assumed 'grow up and go to college' was for everyone just does not apply anymore. in fact, sending 'everyone' to college was a failure waiting to happen.

if I was trained in construction or plumbing or auto repair, I'd still have a job. but being in software development means my country has sold me out to india/china/etc. I really wish I was in another field and I hope some of you software-thinking kids will reconsider this already saturated field and find something PHYSICAL that you can do for work. those things tend not to be outsourced.

I refused to do this when I worked in Uni IT

[rAiNsT0rm]

I used to work for a university's network dept. at a fairly high level and it fell on my shoulders to handle the RIAA complaints, I pretty much refused because it was ridiculous. When I would be forced to turn info over, I would just give them IP's which were basically useless but they would never get back to me for more info. When the pressure really got strong, I decided the only way I would comply would be to install a device that did actual audio fingerprinting. This way it wasn't just a witch hunt or false positives based on someone simply using P2P or a filename but verified inspection and reporting. Even then, it had it's own way of handling it internally, after each offense it encountered it would email the user with the info and a warning, after 3 infractions it basically cut the port speed to 56k for that user so they could still do school work but little else, any additional infractions resulted in reporting.

It put the onus on the student and was as reasonable as could be for the screwed up system in place. In the end the RIAA should never have as much power as it does and the fines should be at most $5-20 per song which is between a 500% and 2000% penalty which is quite enough without being so insane as the current system is. No matter how you slice it, it is B.S.