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CMU Cuts off Net Access for 71 Students Over MP3s
PresOdent writes "Carnegie Mellon University cut off network access to 71 students who allegedly put some copyrighted mp3s on their sites on the university's computer network. The university said it discovered the copyright violations last month, when it conducted surprise inspections of student computer files at the order of the Recording Industry Association of America. Read the article from the Chronicle of Higher Education for more info."
Looks like more and more people are getting busted... I know of many colleges really dont care what thier students do but is this an invasion of the students privacy/rights?
Word on campus (RPI) is that some kids lost Network Access (temporarily) for posting copyrighted movies. Most everyone shares MP3s (many people have password-protected their folders now) but nothing has happened to them.
If another RPI student could verify this, it'd be appreciated. I know plenty of them cruise slashdot.
i dont display scores, and my threshhold is -1. post accordingly.
Discuss
These kids got what they deserved. Distributing MP3s of copyrighted songs is illegal, after all.
:)
I thought Carnegie Mellon students were smarter than this
If these were live sites... they were published works. If I'm not mistaken actions like this could easily be countered under the Personal Privacy and Electronic Communications Provacy Acts. Of course, IANAL...
Get a life, not a lifestyle. - Hikem Bey
While they can't go in and confiscate the students' computers, they are within their rights to deny the students access to the network.
Who in their right mind shares illegal (I am assuming they were copyright infringing) mp3's without at least protecting them with a password???
MP3 is a great format for storing and propagating music, but if the music isn't theirs to give away, the students should not post it. The punishment seems appropriate under the circumstances.
By the way, the complaint that inspecting publicly available files in invasion of privacy registers a zero on the cluemeter.
--neil
Why is this news, surely there's no invasion of privacy issues, if they're facing legal action for illegal files on their computers aren't they within their rights to punish the offenders?
I agree the students should be punished. It is against the usage guidlines set in CMU's computer policy. Acordingly they should lose the privlige (not right) to use those computers.
But I think it could've been done better. Like an email to all students "we will be seraching the disks for any mp3's soon. This will be considered a violation blah blah." Then do it. Again and again. Not just to suddenly do it.
I also have a problem with the RIAA saying they will sue CMU. Again the idea that CMU must police its student's pages is not something I like. I would agree that the RIAA has the right to sue those students though.
And yes I know this will probably be an unpopular opinion in many regards.
-cpd
CMU has historically been very skittish about copyright violations. When I was in school there, they dropped a number of Usenet groups because they alleged that the majority of the posts to them contained illegally copied material. They've also been more than willing to pull the accounts of students whose machines are used to attack other machines. None of that should really be surprising, though; it is, in point of fact, illegal to copy mp3s of copyrighted material and since CMU long ago abandoned any pretense of being a common carrier they would be opening themselves up for legal troubles if they didn't cut of access to copyrighted material once it were found. The only troubling thing here--and it is quite troubling--is that they conducted inspections "at the order of" the RIAA. That could mean either that the RIAA said "we've seen evidence that machines X, Y, and Z have illegal mp3s on them" and CMU looked and verified that, or it could mean the RIAA siad "lots of CMU students have mp3s, why don't you look and see which ones". The first is IMO acceptable and in accordance with how law enforcement would act to comply with search and seizure restrictions. It's probably required to comply with the law, though IANAL. The second is rather heavy-handed, especially for an institute of higher learning. I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
-- rage, rage against the dying of the light
I'm a student at VirginiaTech, and there are some idiots on the local network who leave their mp3 folders open to the public. I wouldn't feel sorry for them at all if they were caught.
Just because the rule wasn't enforced before doesn't mean that they have to make an announcement before they decide to enforce it.
This isn't something new, really.
At the University of Maryland, College Park, they have been cracking down (or trying to) on the distribution of MP3s and pirated software for years. Unfortunatly, their detection has been rather limited, since all they really look for are student machines using significant bandwidth, which, in of itself, isn't proof of wrong doing.
What you'll find on these college campuses, however, is a staff of people who enforce these "Acceptable Use Policies," and these staffs are usually made up of beaurocrats, and not techies. You are usually tried, convicted, and sentenced on even the most circumstancial of evidence. Hell, I know someone who got kicked out of Resident housing over LEGAL MP3s.
And when the more serious network intrusions take place, they do it based on your IP address. It doesn't matter if your machine is owned, your IP hijacked, or the address simply spoofed.
Basicly, there's a new kind of fascist in town. While they may not be smart enough to catch you, they may accuse you anyway and run you through. Be careful.
However this is a good example of what is going to happen in the future of computing and the future of privacy.
More and more there is a push for server side computing. Server side data storage, and server side everything. They keep all your information in various databases, yes even the portols do this. So when all your emila and all your files are kept on a remote server somehwere, who is there to stop them from telling you what you can store and what you cannot store? Maybe I have seen to many episodes of 'the net' but there may soon be a day when your whole life and all your info is on the web, and sys admins will always be able to access this information.
send flames > /dev/null
Only 'flamers' flame!
I don't see the problem. When I was at university they would search our home directories for stuff like password cracking tools and portscanners and so on. Big deal. It's their network, and their hardware, and their software.
I've got no time for college kids running warez sites (albeit music warez not software warez).
What's really strange is that if they go to some lame copyright seminar they get a lenient punishment. This smacks of the kind of enforced education (I use the word loosely) increasingly popular in the US as a way of treating young people of apparent delinquent behaviour. Very odd. At UCL we lost our accounts, full stop, for serious breaches of the rules. If that meant you couldn't complete your CS course then you were in big trouble.
-----
The article brings up, offhand, a bit about privacy concerns. However, since these files were publically available over the school Intranet, that doesn't really apply. Now, I am completely against anyone monitoring my net usage, but when you post illegal content on a school site, they have a right to take it down, and I think CMU acted well here - no harsh punishments, no overreactions, just logical punishment that is fair.
What worries me a lot more than CMU is the fact that the RIAA is forcing colleges to monitor content for compliance with their "rules." Since when can the RIAA enforce laws? Especially since the article doesn't say whether the songs were ripped by those posting them (legal, as long as no one who doesn't own it downloads it!), or which songs were available. Hmm....
People do that here at Michigan Tech too.
I think I'm going to turn someone though.
They have on their dorm door, "movies for sale or trade." So I think that they deserve to be smacked. Advertising that you have illegal copies of SouthPark, Star Wars, and others. Freshman are just too damn stupid.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - F. Voltaire.
Now their network access is obviously the school's, and subject to their terms. Admins can watch what goes into and out of a box, but is it really legal to "search" their computer? That sounds like definate search and seizure, which I thought couldn't be done without a warrant, definately not done just because a record company wanted you to.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
First, tehschool should not punish students on behalf of another entity. The offended groups should sue the students if they think they can win. My advise for these students: take the 90 minute class and get some free webspace from Yahoo, Netcenter or GeoCities or whoever and post your mp3s there.
has my alma mater changed! I was there from '90-94 (in the Physics Dept.), and pirated software was *freely* availible not only on the appletalk networks, but also on the unix boxes. (I never used the pc's so I don't know about them). It was not only well known but joked about amongst the CCONs and UCONs (sysadmin/tech support folks).
Now they are suspending rights to 'net some kids because of mp3s? At a school like that I think that is very unusually harsh. In the pre-Mosiac days, it was very common for profs. to _require_ you to run or read maiterial that was posted either on the intra- or inter-net. This seems highly cruel to me, since it makes it very likely the kids'll fail out.
Note: I did _not_ download or use any of this software. For most of my stay there, I had no computer of my own, but for my freshman year I had an Amiga (which was unsupported). My views of pirated software and software pirates are my own, and I do not choose to share them in a public forum.
Myddrin
has my alma mater changed! I was there from '90-94 (in the Physics Dept.), and pirated software was *freely* availible not only on the appletalk networks, but also on the unix boxes. (I never used the pc's so I don't know about them). It was not only well known but joked about amongst the CCONs and UCONs (sysadmin/tech support folks).
Now they are suspending rights to 'net some kids because of mp3s? At a school like that I think that is very unusually harsh. In the pre-Mosiac days, it was very common for profs. to _require_ you to run or read maiterial that was posted either on the intra- or inter-net. This seems highly cruel to me, since it makes it very likely the kids'll fail out.
Note: I did _not_ download or use any of this software. For most of my stay there, I had no computer of my own, but for my freshman year I had an Amiga (which was unsupported). My views of pirated software and software pirates are my own, and I do not choose to share them in a public forum.
Myddrin
While I don't support the silly actions of WaReZ D00Dz, you've really got to wonder if the University applies the same high standards to on-campus software licensing, the distribution of photocopied materials in class, and the use of trademarked names and logos in its publications.
This is the CMU of Marty Rimm fame, right?
While I am annoyed with those who insist on using mp3 as a method of propogating warez music and giving the rest of us a bad name, who simply want open standards and convinient fair use of the music we have purchased, I must say I find the notion of universities becoming a collective police force for the RIAA more than a little disturbing. When I was in college we all shared cassette tape recordings of music we couldn't afford to buy. This story calls to mind images of University employees and RAs entering dorm rooms, spot checking tape collections for illegal tapes.
While what we did as students was not strictly legal, it was pretty damn harmless. I suspect the RIAA has made a great deal of money on each and every student who did this in college, as nearly all of us have no doubt moved on to buying CD's (and some of us going the extra step and ripping them into mp3 format for convinient access on our hard drives).
I don't approve of what the students did, especially if the files in question were in areas with public access, which being on a web page implies. If they were running warez sites for the world to steal from, then shame on them. But if they were simply exchanging files among themselves, for their own use, then shame on the university and the RIAA for swatting a fly with a sledgehammer.
I once considered making my mp3 collection available *to myself only*, via 128-bit encryption and password authentication, on my web page so I could listen to my music anywhere in the world, without lugging cdroms around. I opted out, as explaining that subtle but critical difference -- the difference between fair use and piracy -- is not something I wanted to do before a judge, especially with the extreme presumption of guilt when the phrase "made his mp3 collection available on a web page" is uttered. While these students probably weren't doing this, can anyone be certain based on the article as written?
No matter how one slices this story, one thing is clear. Even the limited privacy we enjoyed as students even a few short years ago appears to have been vastly more sacrosanct than whatever it is students have now (calling it privacy would be a farce of the worst kind, I'm afraid).
Shame on everyone. This is despicable.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Violations of civil rights and strange standards of evidence are nothing new at universities. A lot of them have the attitude that the student is there for an education, and the 'free' computing facilities are there for educational purposes, not downloading pr0n or warez or whatever.
What disturbs me is that the RIAA can strongarm (or even weakarm) any institution into 'busting' people - and that the university would be proud of this?? The RIAA is NOT a law enforcement agency. They do NOT entitled to enforce the law or 'order' inspections of anything. If the RIAA shows up at my doorstep, I'll sue them for trespassing. I answer to the Law - that means cops following due process - not a bunch of industry extortionists.
Maybe if the RIAA gave money back to the artists instead of keeping it for the music monopolies, I might be less inclined to use the flamethrower here. But they aren't, and this is just plain wrong.
The university said it discovered the copyright violations last month, when it conducted surprise inspections of student computer files at the behest of the Recording Industry Association of America.
If I was the head of a univeristy I wouldn't listen to the RIAA, even if they threatened to sue, because they could only bring legal action upon the students. It would be like if I hacked slashdot and put up an mp3 ftp site. The RIAA couldn't prosecute Rob or Hemos. They would find an prosecute me. People are so afraid of the RIAA. If I were in their shoes I would only listen to law enforcement officials.
There are a LOT of students sharing MP3's at my university, but the university hasn't done anything about it unless the RIIA tells them about a specific student.
The message I've gotten was that they didn't care if we traded MP3's amongst ourselves as long as we weren't part of a big pirating ring. If my school suddenly changed its stance, I'd be surprised (pissed) too.
My University (Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA) did this in Spring of 1998. 5 students on my floor had network access terminated for the entire term due to MP3 sharing (they were, admittedly, stupid about it, non-passworded shares labelled "mp3"). Given that spring term is when we apply for coop jobs, and we had to grab the coop job lists off the network servers, they were hurting a fair bit.
I heard a report from somewhere that last year over 500 students at Drexel fell to the same fate (all frosh tho). Yet, nowhere in the networking policies do they specify MP3's, and an amazing number of people in this country don't even think twice before grabbing an MP3 or 50 for late night coding music. Noone really bothers to think that, yes, mp3's ARE copyright infringement if you don't own the CD. They just click and drag, click and drag...
Yes, I have MP3's. Used to have a secure 8GB archive on a server I administered. But anything I listened to on a regular basis, I bought the CD for. That's what I do now. I just bought 7 CDs to cover 17 MP3's that I listen to daily. If the music is good, I have no problems purchasing the CD and supporting the artist. Unfortunately, the local radio stations like to censor music, and they play the same 20 songs all damned day.
But I digress. This isn't the first time students have been raided, and I'm damned sure it won't be the last time.
"To err is human, to forgive is simply not my policy." --root
Here in Belgium, major ISP Skynet was courtordered to have all links to illegal MP3 downloadsites removed.
Judge ruled that the ISP was liable/responsable for the content on its users sites/homepages.
If they didn't they got a fine of approx 300$/link.
Standford revoked many people's access for running Linux last year.. but people easily go arround it by running port scan detectors. I think serious people will just move to that sort of system now, i.e. deny access to all on camopus computer execpt ones that lie in blocks wired to dorm rooms. This creas an interesting idea: I wonder how easy it would be to keep an updated list of RIAA and co. IP blocks? I know they can always get a short term dialup account, but that can not be as efficent as looking for people from their own systems. Any ideas?
It will take a little more work to make Piracy really safe for the windows users, but most of the time the people looking for piracy don't check out SMB shares anyway.
Speaking of making piracy safe, here is an interesting idea: use a daemon (using a random port selected at install time and automatic portscan detector) to create a network were each person's computer shares it's list of MP3s but only talked to their friends systems for everyday sorts of contact (well execpt for actually transmitting the MP3s). Sorta like an old BBS style network.. execpt with no global network map. This could go a long way to making it impossible to effectivly bust pirates. I mean they could always go after the one guy who was pirating a specifi thin (like a movie) but it would be uneconomical to just go take out the popular since every site would be equally popular and tere would be no way (short of DLing all the MP3s on the network) to KNOW that you had them all. just a though..
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I once had a nightmare in which Carnegie Mellon University was free to usher in the beginning of a disrespectful new era of parasitism. There is absolutely nothing these foul-mouthed diabolic-types will not do to destroy their enemies. They will poke into the most secret family affairs and not rest until their truffle-searching instinct digs up some deplorable incident that is calculated to finish off their unfortunate victim. It is easy to see from the foregoing that I take seriously the view that just because you can do something does not mean it's okay to do it. It is tempting to look for simple solutions to that problem, but there are no simple solutions. I don't know when obscurantism became chic, but we can never return to the past. And if we are ever to move forward to the future, we have to indicate in a rough and approximate way the two snooty tendencies that I believe are the main driving force of modern Marxism.
I respect Carnegie Mellon University's criticisms, although it got into a snit the last time I pointed out that the truth of this is by no means limited to the field of general culture, but applies to politics as well. If there is one thing I have learned, it is this: you don't need to look far to see that Carnegie Mellon University continuously seeks adulation from its cronies. Apparently, some of Carnegie Mellon University's wishy-washy tirades are so self-contradictory, they're their own refutation. If a new Dark Age is about to descend upon us -- as many believe it will -- it will be the result of Carnegie Mellon University's writings.
After all, if we submit to Carnegie Mellon University's definition of "hexosemonophosphoric" and become unscrupulous, we have lost the war for self-preservation. Unsettling as that is, the more infuriating fact is that if Carnegie Mellon University is allowed to burn books, the implications can be widespread. I have just one word for Carnegie Mellon University: transubstantiatively. If saturnine ignoramuses can one day replace the search for truth with a situationist relativism based on acrimonious alcoholism, then the long descent into night is sure to follow. By now, we are all more than familiar with Carnegie Mellon University's unpleasant deeds. Let me explain. Outrage pounded in my temples when I first realized that Carnegie Mellon University wants to hijack the word "ultraphotomicrograph" and use it to destroy the values, methods, and goals of traditional humanistic study.
Carnegie Mellon University's stratagems have grown into an intemperate tapestry weaving together classical conspiracy theories of the 19th century and post-Marxian economics. It's my hunch that Carnegie Mellon University uses the term "theoanthropomorphism" with ostensible confidence that its meaning is universally understood. Notice the raucous tendency of Carnegie Mellon University's bons mots. This is kind of a touchy subject to some people. Speaking of abominable imbeciles, no one of any intelligence believes that anyone who resists Carnegie Mellon University deserves to be crushed. Human life is full of artificiality, perversion, and misery, much of which is caused by the worst types of immoral riffraff I've ever seen. And that's the honest truth.
And this is supposed to make it alright?
I am upset about one comment from the article as it implies that the RIAA will force the responsibility upon the colleges. All it will take is for one school to be sued and access to computers will either be revoked across the board or replaced by locked down, MS Windows workstations managed by SMS refreshing the builds every night to ensure that no one can do anything anymore.
Power is nothing without control --or-- Who polices the police?
Can the RIAA do that? I mean, they're a private agency, and not a government institution, right? Even the government needs a subpoena. Or was the college just being 'nice' to the RIAA?
I'm sorry. What I meant to say was 'please excuse me.'
what came out of my mouth was 'Move or I'll kill you!'
The article seems to state that all of these searches were done by checking the contents of ~/public_html files on University owned servers. While it may have been a bit surprising for the University, given the choice between slapping 71 students on the wrist or potentially having a very expensive lawsuit from the RIAA, well, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out which is the better idea.
If you're a CMU student and want to rebel against it, just fill up your public_html with mp3's generated with dd if=/dev/zero of=bjork-its_too_quiet.mp3 or dd if=/dev/random of=foo_fighters-random_mumblings.mp3. Civil disobedience is mighty effective.
Remember though guys, music is copyrighted and if you're listening to something then you like it enough to buy it. Most of the professional musicians I know are scared of mp3 due to the massive piracy which currently occurs in that medium. I'm not an mp3 fan, but I'd like to see the format legitimized. Let's hope this kind of thing doesn't give the record industry excuses to charge me even more per disc.
They were LESS liable for the behaviour of their students BEFORE they started snooping. Now that they've set a precedent of editorial control over content on their network, they will have to keep monitoring for and removing copyright violations (or potential violations, or libel, or obscenity, or any other forbidden-speech-du-jour) from now on.
Which is exactly what the RIAA wants, methinks.
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Yep, just flip the big red switch (make sure you've installed ext3 patches for convenience) and wish the RIAA good luck with examining your /pub/mp3 partition :)
Disclaimer: this is in no way an endorsement for illegally distributing copyrighted material!
(talk about covering MY ass)
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
I think college students (me included, at one point) tend to forget that the super-fast network access is a priviledge of being at college and not a friggin' right! If most universities have a `privacy policy', I don't think they're going to have any qualms about looking at files stored on their own hard drives to check there's nothing illegal there. Even looking at `public' files on students own boxes wouldn't surprise me; it's their network after all.
I'm lucky and can have my Linux box on-line 24/7 from the comfort of my bedroom; nobody demanded my root password as a condition of providing this service so I think I'm fairly lucky. But I do know damned well the Computer Services people run probes on the contents of anonymous FTP servers and regularly look for other network `weaknesses' on students' boxes.
So I hardly think this is an invasion of anybody's privacy, only a few stupid students who didn't hide their illegal activities a bit better; playing the invasion-of-privacy card just doesn't work here. In fact they've only been cut off for the rest of the semester; pretty lenient all in all.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
Now, I hate the RIAA as much as anyone out there (more than most, actually)...but can you blame a university for kicking people off their network for posting mp3s onto the University webserver? If you read the article, these people were ripping CD's and copying them to their html account on the University server. If anything, they had to have been violating their HD space quotas...
;)
Yes, we should fight against RIAA, but let's not bring everyone around us down with us.
Oh, and I thought it kinda funny they said the guys could either take a 90 minute class on copyright law and get net access back in 4 weeks or have to go without for the rest of the semester...this story must be old, because for most schools there's only about 4 weeks left in the semester!
One thing the article leaves out is that not only were publically accessible directories searched, but some semi-private ones as well. If the searcher was able to either easily guess the password (something along the lines of "mp3") or was able to learn the password by sending an e-mail message to the archive's maintainer, and copyrighted material was found, network access was revoked.
Some relevant articles:
Computing Services reprimands students
Officials crack down on piracy
and an editorial:
CMU: consider approach toward network integrity
(These are all from The Tartan, CMU's student newspaper.)
It is in RIAA's (a.k.a. the few dominant record companies) interest to fight the mp3 format itself - in order to protect their monopoly on their self-proclaimed "value-added" distribution channel. Piracy is only their second reason.
/dev/mp3 ?
Illegal mp3's are their excuse to threat and raid.
Put more LEGAL mp3's on the net.
Distribute as much of your music in mp3 as possible, and tell your musician friends to - even a 1-minute performance, vocal or purely-instrumental, or even speech. The point is to use mp3 as your DEFAULT sound format.
Put more effort on promoting mp3 as a legitimate, open channel of music distribution so that SDMI won't stand a chance.
On second thought, any window managers playing mp3's as their alert events? Or is there any effort to make a
I know this sounds maybe too unreal to be believed, but I liked the free access to information environment at CMU. We had no money, and yet we all had pirated versions of quake, warcraft, starcraft, and plenty of MP3s and movie files. South Park episodes were on almost everyones' shared directory. I miss the freedom of going to any share directory in the CMU network and grabbing dozens of MP3 files I wanted very quickly, very easily, and very freely. What am I saying? That's illegal, immoral, and wrong! Right? I remember hoping that this was the future of computing - where everyone could claim access to anything and any entertainment they wanted. Now it's clear CMU doesn't want this to be the future. Why do so many here support *Free* software and yet cling so hard to copyright? Information should be free people, that's what we fought Microsoft for! We're the hippies, we're the rebels, we're the people who hate the restrictiveness of society, right? Sadly, Benjamin Shniper
The state of our legal system is not such that they can afford to risk it. They DO face liability for allowing mp3 sites to run which they're made aware of. Furthermore, trading of copyrighted mp3s like that is still technically illegal, and the college does have a certain obligation to minimize it, especially when they can do so with so little effort.
There's a group of people who insist that rights be taken away to a large class so they may make a comfortable living.
Back when I was in school, it didn't matter that I was paying $10,000 a year, some people thought tax money was paying our tuitions and we were sheep that had no rights. We were to make their investments profitable. Listen to their advertising, buy their books, and work for their cretin companies when they were hiring.
I became aware of this mentality when the internet went public around 1995 and spammers stated they had a right to send me crap as I did not pay for the internet, but from taxes. Dumb logic, dumb capitalists.
Now their network access is obviously the school's, and subject to their terms. Admins can watch what goes into and out of a box, but is it really legal to "search" their computer?"
Where from that article did you get that the students' computers were being searched? The article clearly states that CMU "randomly checked the public portions of 250 students' computer accounts". In no case, however, were system admins "illegally" searching through private computers.
---
"Go Metallica. Die RIAA." -- Linus Torvalds
We probably all agree, that the university acted correctly on a perfectly legal request of the RIAA. On the other hand most consumers are not happy to be ripped off by the music industry which in the meantime defines what is 'good' and what is 'bad' music, serving more and more mainstream garbage barely worth listening more than once.
Obviously the internet in combination with mp3 can be used to distribute music free of charge (most expenses can be covered by advertising) very fast, there are probably also a lot of small bands which would never be considered for promotion by the major labels but make very fine music nevertheless. (Just recently i stumbled over an excellent demo tape, and was very sad to hear that this will never be pressed to CD.) So why not combine these two, creating a network of mirrorsites distributing really independant and free music across the internet.
I think there would be a lot of bands grabbing the opportunity to have their music published this way, either out of idealism, or maybe just to become known. If the distributing sites could cover their costs with advertising the whole thing might work very well.
To avoid legal catfights some sort of 'GPL for music' (e.g. freely distributable as long as the artists are credited) would be a good thing. The distributing sites should also cover reviews, so you know what you get before downloading 20 MB of mp3.
I wouldn't wonder if such a thing already existed, anybody care to provide some pointers?
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Here's a link with more specific information on the crackdown, directly from the CMU computing services newsletter.
o rk
http://www.cmu. edu/computing/cursor/fall99cursor.html#anchornetw
It seems that shared directories on the local university LAN were searched.
---
"Go Metallica. Die RIAA." -- Linus Torvalds
I work for the networking department of my school, where I have a much faster computer than my own at home and a very fast link. So that's the computer I rip and encode my cds on so I can listen to music all day. Am I going to get fired because the filenames are publicly viewable?
I also often download mp3s -- the legal kind. Some of my favorite bands at least allow one or two mp3s to be freely distributed (often bootlegs). These files I'll even put in a publicly accessable directory. Will I get fired for that?
Sometimes I download my mp3s to my machine at home. This is over a modem line, so it's not always feasible, but I still sometimes do it. Is it illegal to distribute copyrighted material to oneself? I'm waiting for the day some power happy administrator with a sniffer is going to turn me in for breaking the backs of the poor exploited American musical artist through the horrible act of listening to and supporting their music.
So how many students at CMU were only distributing mp3s legitimately? How many of them simply only had their own mp3s, but weren't technologically competent enough to make them private? How far did the school go to locate these files, and in contrast how far did they go to prove that these files were indeed illegal? I'm afraid I didn't see any of these questions answered in the article. Are there any other sources of information?
logan
(eagerly awaiting RIAA to come to his school, though they probably have already)
Sounds like they are scapegoating a larger issue on these 70 students. Lets see, they checked 250 accounts, they found 70 violators. This seems to indicate that around 20% of the students were violating the MP3 policy. Extrapolating from the articles mentioned figure of around 10000 people on the network, you can guess that there are around 2000 mp3 violators out there. So why arbitrarily punish 70 of them? Randomly enforcing a law is a very dangerous thing -- I wouldn't be surprised if some of these 250 "randomly" selected students were not randomly selected at all.
Funny that they will be so uptight about this, but go to great lengths to protect their open servers and promote spam: http://www.orbs.org/DAT/manual
Doesn't the Consitution of the USofA protect us all from "Cruel and Unusual" punishment? Take away their mp3s, but don't cut net access! Somebody call the ALCU!
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
Not necessarily. Be sure to read your AUP. Some Universities that I know of have it in your AUP that any bits that reside on their equipment (web pages, shell machines, file servers, etc) are their property.
What does this mean? They can read "your" email? Yes. They can look at "your" files? Yes. They can remove/move "your" files? Yes. Your rights have been infringed upon? No. You agreed to the AUP that describes all of this. Read it!
-BProbably all CMU had to do was to simply paste a notice up asking students to remove the illegal MP3s or face charges from RIAA.
Of course, RIAA would be foolish to sue CMU (but then nothing they have done so far shows they cannot be!) and most of the time, students can self-regulate themselves. CMU did over-react.
That said, I should say the penalties are quite mild in this case.
is what i'd like to know. I know i own almost every album that my mp3's come off of. The only reason I spent so much time dl'ing them is that i do like to see if i'll like a song or a CD before i go and spend my money. I know there are lots of people out there who will just rack up the GB's with mp3's of songs they have no intention of buying, but i understood the current US law to say that if you have a legal recording you can copy it in as many different ways, as long as it's for your own use. So what if they put thm in shared directories, "oh hey, let's go to so-and-so's room to study, i'll share out my stuff so we can listen to it from over there". dunno, sounds like a big stink about nothing....
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
Greetings, I am a student at CMU right now and give you all the lowdown on what happened. Basically the CMU admin did a search to see which computers where ebign heavily downloaded from and such. They then did a sweep of the network checking a computers here and there. The looked at all directories not password protected, but also.. and here's why some students are upset. They guesses a few passwords as well. Now, they didn't go trying to hack into machines or anything, but they did try passwords such as "mp3" or "cmu" for directories labeled "warez" or "mp3" and such. Personally I don't really have a problem with this, it is illegal after all, I guess its just strange because its seemed so natural to go download things like mp3's that we've forgotten it's actually akin to theft. Thanks, Adam Steele Physics/CS Sophmore
It's too bad these students at CMU weren't indicted for their illegal activities rather than just face the mild punishment of having their network access revoked.
It's scum like these students that give the RIAA plenty of horror stories to peddle and will ultimately aid them in their efforts to reign in MP3. I love MP3 -- I've converted about 1,000 CDs I own to MP3 and have them on a file server, but appropriating other people's intellectual property is wrong and will only hurt efforts for open and free standards.
Didn't these idiots ever learn that stealing is wrong?
It's true that distributing mp3's is illegal, but who doesn't? Laws that can't be enforced properly, fairly, and uniformily shouldn't be laws at all. Technically, most slashdot should be in jail. Technically, most everybody should be in jail for speeding, *over and over again*. This idea of "protecting" artist's work is ludicrous. The artist's don't even *see* 99% of the money that's made with cd's of their music. Copyrights are mostly about protecting corporation's right to screw consumers and most importantly, screw artists... well, in this case in particular, at least. A better system that takes out the middleman needs to develop. It's really that simple... the middleman is the only one making money from the entire thing. Germany's autobahn makes speeding legal. Drugs are legal in Amsterdam. Neither of these places are "evil", they just simply both have common sense, something which most north american laws seem to lack.
When I was at the US Naval Academy 2 years ago, they started doing random searches for mp3's. The reason for doing this was to look for any type of music at all, cd's, tapes, anything. You see thing thing is, when you're a plebe there (first year student) you're not allowed to have any music at all. Nothing. The whole year. Of course no one goes the whole year doing this, and I introduced quite a few of my classmates to the wonderful world of mp3's. When they started doing the random searches, we realized they were just doing a global search for *.mp* (they thought they were being smart and getting all those mp2 files too.) So we just went and changed the extenstions of all our mp3 files to .IHT (IHT is short for IHTFP which is an abbreviation of I Hate This F---ING Place) They didnt find our mp3's. -BH
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
Get a clue. He's objecting to the fact that record companies are bundling popular songs that they know the public will want with mediocre songs that most people don't want. A single popular song, if unbundled, might cost you $2 - $3, whereas a CD will set you back $12-18. They're bundling simply to increase their profits.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
If thing were appropriateally priced I would buy them, when not I simply "copy" them. Stealing? BLAH! Stealing is taking bread, a car, money. These obects have already been bought at market value. A market value that INCLUDES the assumption that they will be copied. Would MS charge so much for ofice pro if they got 100% registration? NO! Same here for RIAA. So I am simply doing what the market has made into the norm. I copied software and music BECAUSE of the cost. That's it and that's the way it will be BTW as an American I enjoy screwing "big industry". I root for the underdog and have sympathy for the devil!
Almost every school and business I've been at issues warnings about improper use of computer resources for side businesses or illegal activity. The remedy is the fork out the $400 a year or so it costs to be your own web host on a DSL line.
Is this some pre-canned tirade with the string "Carnegie Mellon University" replacing some previous text string? Let's see what happens to the first 3 paragraphs when it's replaced with "my baby sister" :> Maybe I'm naturally oversensitive, or maybe someone just slipped me decaf coffee this morning, but we all have an obligation to stand up together and forcefully oppose my baby sister's uneducated reinterpretations of copyright law. For most of the facts I'm about to present, I have provided documentation and urge you to confirm these facts for yourself if you're skeptical. How can we expect to help you reflect and reexamine your views on my baby sister if we walk right into my baby sister's trap? A necessary first step towards recovery is to look at my baby sister with new eyes, unclouded by a lifetime of false information and deception propagated by the most choleric perverts you'll ever see. According to my baby sister, anyone who points this out is guilty of spreading lies, smears, and racism -- an instructive warning for the future. I once had a nightmare in which my baby sister was free to usher in the beginning of a disrespectful new era of parasitism. There is absolutely nothing these foul-mouthed diabolic-types will not do to destroy their enemies. They will poke into the most secret family affairs and not rest until their truffle-searching instinct digs up some deplorable incident that is calculated to finish off their unfortunate victim. It is easy to see from the foregoing that I take seriously the view that just because you can do something does not mean it's okay to do it. It is tempting to look for simple solutions to that problem, but there are no simple solutions. I don't know when obscurantism became chic, but we can never return to the past. And if we are ever to move forward to the future, we have to indicate in a rough and approximate way the two snooty tendencies that I believe are the main driving force of modern Marxism. I respect my baby sister's criticisms, although it got into a snit the last time I pointed out that the truth of this is by no means limited to the field of general culture, but applies to politics as well. If there is one thing I have learned, it is this: you don't need to look far to see that my baby sister continuously seeks adulation from its cronies. Apparently, some of my baby sister's wishy-washy tirades are so self-contradictory, they're their own refutation. If a new Dark Age is about to descend upon us -- as many believe it will -- it will be the result of my baby sister's writings.
Is this some pre-canned tirade with the string "Carnegie Mellon University" replacing some previous text string? Let's see what happens to the first 3 paragraphs when it's replaced with "my baby sister" :>
Maybe I'm naturally oversensitive, or maybe someone just slipped me decaf coffee this morning, but we all have an obligation to stand up together and forcefully oppose my baby sister's uneducated reinterpretations of copyright law. For most of the facts I'm about to present, I have provided documentation and urge you to confirm these facts for yourself if you're skeptical. How can we expect to help you reflect and reexamine your views on my baby sister if we walk right into my baby sister's trap? A necessary first step towards recovery is to look at my baby sister with new eyes, unclouded by a lifetime of false information and deception propagated by the most choleric perverts you'll ever see. According to my baby sister, anyone who points this out is guilty of spreading lies, smears, and racism -- an instructive warning for the future.
I once had a nightmare in which my baby sister was free to usher in the beginning of a disrespectful new era of parasitism. There is absolutely nothing these foul-mouthed diabolic-types will not do to destroy their enemies. They will poke into the most secret family affairs and not rest until their truffle-searching instinct digs up some deplorable incident that is calculated to finish off their unfortunate victim. It is easy to see from the foregoing that I take seriously the view that just because you can do something does not mean it's okay to do it. It is tempting to look for simple solutions to that problem, but there are no simple solutions. I don't know when obscurantism became chic, but we can never return to the past. And if we are ever to move forward to the future, we have to indicate in a rough and approximate way the two snooty tendencies that I believe are the main driving force of modern Marxism.
I respect my baby sister's criticisms, although it got into a snit the last time I pointed out that the truth of this is by no means limited to the field of general culture, but applies to politics as well. If there is one thing I have learned, it is this: you don't need to look far to see that my baby sister continuously seeks adulation from its cronies. Apparently, some of my baby sister's wishy-washy tirades are so self-contradictory, they're their own refutation. If a new Dark Age is about to descend upon us -- as many believe it will -- it will be the result of my baby sister's writings.
As someone who works for CMU and knew about (but did not participate in) the crackdown, here's some more info on what happened:
...", and it appeared to be an invitation to share, it was checked.
Several staff members went through Network Neighborhood by hand. Any machines that had open folders with names that appeared to contain copyright violations were checked. Passwords that are "obviously" intended for sharing (like "mp3") were checked. If there was a README that said anything like "My password is
A few students had only legal material, and when they pointed this out, their network access was quickly restored. Most of the students were only angry that they'd been caught.
This is a grey area, but the people who did the scan tried to make sure that they only went after people who were attempting to distribute music to people they might not know, which, if not illegal, is certainly a violation of CMU ethics.
As far as the passwords used, would you seriously argue that an ftp site wasn't open if the username and password were "ftp", and a README popped up before login telling you about this password? Passwords like "mp3" are the common way of saying "share and enjoy" around here, so it was considered public.
If you're going to do something illegal, at least have the common sense to be low key about it.
Since I live less than 15 miles from the CMU campus, I think of this as hitting close to home.
The RIAA is in the right if they are persuing people who illegally are distributing MP3s.
If these kids had ANY brains at all they would have hosted the servers on their own machines. Why? Because it would take a warrant for someone to look at their machines. And if they were going to search the machines of 71 students it's going to be hard to keep the word from getting out. This would give many people time to encrypt, hide, or dump the MP3s.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Common ./'er reaction to this story: "What about the students' right to privacy?! They were violated...."
./ and email from all over the world? Will they have a tough time attracting new freshmen because of their get-tough stance on MP3's? Maybe....but if they have the moral conviction to stand by their policies then it really doesn't matter.
I guess people always like to play the "P" card because they have a vague understanding of their Constitutional rights against illegal search and seizure.....by the governent on their private property.
Now, when one private entity--a corporation or university--owns a resource such as a network, you can kiss privacy goodbye. Court cases, like it or not, have clearly established that employers have the right to go through your corporate email at any time for any reason or no reason if they so choose--it's their network resources and they can do with them as they see fit. Now if the Feds show up in the company lobby and wanna go through the mail server logs that's a different story altogether.....that's where I say the Constitution kicks in.
The same rationale could be applied to these kids at CMU--a private institution. The university owns and operates the network, and grants the university community priveleges to use it, not rights. The university is responsible to ensure that its network resources are used in an ethical and legal manner, so it is perfectly within its rights to go through any area of the network and look at anything it wants to with no notice, except for private student PCs. Password protected or not, the files resided on a private network.
Reality is that the letter of the law and political correctness usually differ greatly. Public policy follows opinions in a democracy, and when opinions collide we end up in court. Does CMU have a PR battle ahead over this to win the hearts and minds of "violated" students and armchair rights activists chiming in on
I'm no fan of RIAA and their lawyers and scare tactics either....but they are doing what I'd expect them to do by aggressively protecting the cash flow of their artists.
To regain their network access, they had to do the following:
I laughed until I cried. I just have to say "What the heck were you thinking!?" I mean, these guys are smart enough to come to Carnegie Mellon, yet they are stupid enough to share their ENTIRE HARDDRIVE worth of:
That's just absolutely stupid. And they don't seem to realize that FTP is 1. a faster protocol 2. a safer protocol. I run an FTP site at CMU - it's my own private collection of MP3s. I also run SaMbA on my machine - but I've host.denied everyone except myself and my friends. I've found this solution is an excellent way to circumvent any type of crackdown on illegal activity.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
These students had it coming to them, if anything. If you're going to serve up illegal material from your computer, make sure that you make it impossible for "administrative" types (who are incompetent more often than not) to find it. I attend Cornell University, whose NT-loving sysadmins occasionally go looking on various SMB shares for MP3s. The students who get caught are the ones who publicly share their MP3s in an un-pw'ed Windows workgroup (the network contract I signed did not authorize them to crack my box). That's one thing. Putting your MP3s on anonymous FTP is quite the same--you're asking for trouble. I have no pity for students who get caught because they were stupid. Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of Linux should be able to secure their box against the feeble probings of sysadmins who are scared s***less of a command line.
"Even genius needs a competent technique."--Robert Fripp
I agree with the Favorite Artist sucks saying. Even if the record company is "bundling", it's still the artist who recorded the songs.
Not to say I'm against getting mp3's (the more the merrier, I say....), but as stated time and time again on slashdot, if you love the band and love the music, buy the friggin cd.
Karnal
I have a friend who goes to the University Of Pittsburgh (CMU is also in Pittsburgh in case you didn't know). She just got an email yesterday and they said they would be scanning the network soon and disciplining students who have illegal mp3s. So apparently this is becoming more common.
I suggested the following:
1. Rename *.mp3 to *.3pm or *.zip or *.123. I doubt the University really cares, they're just trying to cover their ass.
2. Hide all illegal mp3s. In their place put a few legit ones from unsigned bands at mp3.com. See what they say, if you're willing to test the system.
I'll try to get the letter and post it under this thread (or if anyone has it please feel free to do so).
Brian
At my college, alot of people share MP3's over SMB. I've also noticed that some people share their C:\ (with no password, and sometimes full-access :)
Usually, you can go to C:\Program Files\Winamp\ and find a few MP3's. I'm wondering if these people would be in trouble, even though they're probably not aware that they're sharing at all. If I share a folder that contains many things (source code, GNU utils, articles I wrote, and Oops! My Mp3 folder, and I gave it the name of "Personal Archive" would I be held accountable?
Only Windows Networking (SMB) shares were subjected to the network sweep. As a result, any Linux, *BSD, or other shares were left untouched. In fact, by clicking on a person's URL in a Slashdot post (a NetBSD server) I was able to find a cache of MP3's and Warez that were completely ignored by Lerchey and crew.
Use Linux, or any non-SMB FTP server for that matter, and you can leech to your heart's content.
For more information, click here.
If your have a work email and filespace, or university email and filespace, they are property of the company or university. They own the disks and machines. If your going to use your work or college email and file space for personal use, then expect it to be scrutinised. As for ISP's I'd say examing what comes through your email box would be an invasion of privacy as most people that sign up to an ISP dont expect some admin to flick through their personal emails. But when it comes to your job or studies, this would be deemed acceptable because your meant to be using them for work or studying and nothing else. Though of course not many people do just stick to that. I know here at the company I'm at that they have the right to examine my hard disk and email box as its techically their property and no doubt that is worded into my contract. Brad
This is not interesting, it's yet another post from that automatic complaint generator. Actually read the drivel before you moderate it up.
Which one of these is correct?
1:It's true that distributing mp3's is illegal, but who doesn't?
2:It's true that speeding is illegal, but who doesn't?
3:It's true that killing people is illegal, but who doesn't?
4:It's true that using pirated software is illegal, but who doesn't?
5:It's true that beating your wife is illegal, but who doesn't?
"Laws that can't be enforced properly, fairly, and uniformily shouldn't be laws at all."
Uh yeah. Sure. Whatever. Gun control? F' it. Lets just arm everyone - let God sort 'em out. Come on. I'll be the first to admit that it's obscene how music NEVER goes down in price. A tape (when tapes were "the medium") was $15. A CD today is $15. Hell - MD is cheaper than CD. But it's about that material being SOMEONE ELSE'S PROPERTY. Copyright law isn't just about protecting faceless corporations. It's about protecting the rights of Stephen King, Aretha Franklin, even Yanni. Anyone who chooses to spend their time developing IP.
If music companies make too much in your mind, only buy from indies! IP is IP, no matter where it comes from. These students got what they deserved.
"A better system that takes out the middleman needs to develop"
Gimme a break. You mean "A better system that gives me cheap or preferably free music needs to develop"
The RIAA, which is a legal front and pressure group for the protection of the oligopoly of music production in America, is at it again. They want there to be only three ways to get music: over the radio, where you get addicted to it, on CDs where you buy it for 10 to 20 times what it cost to produce, and in the background of popular movies and shows, where you again go to the record store and buy the music for the soundtrack.
What really upsets me is that we have the tools now to be truly free of these ancient restrictions. All it takes is some freedom from the outside world (as in CMU) and a desire (to listen to music) with a problem (no money) to get the ball rolling. Like in the 60s, I know that using drugs and stealing music is a dead end, but to the hundreds of CMU students now forced to follow such restrictiveness while I had a so much easier time of it all, I'd like to say, "Bummer Dudes."
-Benjamin Shniper
There seems to be a few misconceptions about why people are upset about privacy violations. I'm a CMU student (not one of those involved), and I really think that the journalistic slant is ridiculous. People, you simply have no idea what is going on from that article.
The article said that people were putting up MP3s on Web sites. Uh, no. The university network administrations conducted a sweep of *Windows shared drives* looking for MP3s. Plenty of people have shared drives. Sharing a partition of your drive so that you can use it around campus (like listening to your MP3s in a computer cluster) is not equivalent to posting them to a Web site. Furthermore, the university deliberately broke into some of the computers they examined. Some of the shares were unpassworded. I supposed I can at least understand the university being upset about this, if the shares were obviously intended for public access. However, if CMU found what they deemed to be "dubious" computers, containing *passworded* shares with a name like "MP3", "MUSIC", they started running a password guesser on the computer until they got in.
Now, I can at least see accessing public shares. If they weren't designated as "for public use", that's one thing. But guessing passwords is unforgivable. Quite frankly, if I started trying to "guess" root passwords to the network administrators' computers, I'd be kicked off the network. Evidently, the fact that our computers happened to be connected to the network gives the network admins an idea that they have a right to break into our computers. They broke into some of our *privately owned* computers, into *passworded* segments of our computer that were obviously *not* public. This is blatently illegal, and the fact that CMU would do something like this at the urging of the RIAA disgusts me.
The news article was flat out wrong, and heavily biased toward the RIAA. I'm not impressed.
This sets a chilling prescedent. If I can say that some sort of content on a computer connected to my network is "dubious", then I would evidently have some sort of legal right to break in to private computers. This is, in my mind, not acceptable. If I have a share named "warez", can the university then legally break into my computer? What about one called "software"? What about one called "private project for MIT" (i.e. research not being done for CMU)?
Quite frankly, I hope the CMU network admins get sued under every computer trespassing law available. If CMU can do it (a traditionally level-headed place), *anyone* can legally examine your private computer.
That's the entire point. The MP3s were on Windows shares, not web sites. And many of the shares *were* passworded...CMU ran a password guesser to break in.
The news article conveniently ignores this. They need to talk to students, not just the RIAA and CMU net admins.
I heard there is a microsoft file format called wmf. Shouldn't they be using this warez music format files then?
I'm a student at Penn State University. I got in trouble once for having an ftp server set up to my mp3s. That was a little different. The local area network has never been touched. I don't even see how the RIAA without checking out Network Neighborhood with the students IPs. As far as Penn State is concerned, I don't see how they would ever sort through every students folders in their shares. Guess we'll just have to start using passwords. :( I hate that.
Many of them were on passworded drives. CMU broke into passworded computers to examine them. *That* is why CMU students are up in arms. CMU doesn't have the right to break into private sections of privately owned computers, regardless of whether the computer is connected to the network or not.
As a student and work study for CMU Network Engineering, I known and work with the people that conducted these searches. I am fully aware of their attitude towards students. If it was up to them they'd shut off dormitory network access immediately. Previous actions and these have only reenforced my assumption of the bigger problem:
CMU Network Admins care more about protecting the rest of the Internet from CMU students than they care about protecting CMU students from the rest of the Internet.
smooth.
The funny part is, what they did is not technically illegal. I remeber several years agi a very prominent 'warez' site run out of MIT that had GIGS of things to download. When they pressed it in court, it was thrown out. Pirating is illegal, but happening to leave your cassette tapes out where people can copy them ISN'T.. ;-P
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
smooth comparison guy. remind me to stay out of your cd collection i might get shot.
CMU has consistently blown both hot and cold on technology issues. Most of it stems from administrators that don't know technology. And a few (bad) professors who are more politically inclined than technologically literate.
Remember back in '83 when that Suzuki kid got axed. He created a series of nested subdirectories. They accused him of taking down a mainframe. He didn't. (I saw the logs.) But that didn't stop CMU from pulling all his other computer accounts on suspicion. In that era, without PC's, losing his other accounts triggered a forced-fail in half his classes. Followed by the disciplinary board kicking him out of the school when he contested it.
I saw a friend of mine, Doug, accused of cheating. Apparently his program was sufficiently similar to another student's code. They both had the same obscure bug in their logic. Prof ruled it cheating. No matter that Doug had witnesses to his writing the code in the lab. No matter that Doug was one of the more brilliant hackers in the lab, and didn't need to cheat. No matter that Doug was taking the course as an "extra", having already filled his requirements and electives. Professor gave Doug a forced-fail. And if Doug contested it, it went to the disciplinary board of review. Which tended to kick students out.
I was there when a friend of mine found a severe hole in AFS (kerbros) authentication that allowed one to assume the identities of other users. The first piece of advice that I gave him was: Whatever you do, DON'T tell the administration! They will suspend your account and kick you out of the school! (We eventually went behind the administration's back to unofficially inform the coding staff.)
At one point I paid good money to take a class that had a 60% drop rate. That did horrible things to the curve. I had to drop or fail. Without reimbursement if I dropped, of course.
I don't usually advocate lawsuits. But CMU is well overdue for a lawsuit for violating its students rights and its contractual obligations. And when that happens, it'll make an awfully big different to the rest of the student body. Unfortunately, undergrads tend to be young and uninformed as to their legal options. I know I was.
One thing about this affair *REALLY* well and truely bothers me. In fact, it has me downright pissed off:
[["The university said it discovered the copyright violations last month, when it conducted surprise inspections of student computer files AT THE ORDER of the Recording Industry Association of America. Read"]] [[[[EMPHESIS mine]]]]
"At the order". When the HELL did a fu*king trade group get the authority to ORDER around a major computer science university?!?!?!?!!!!
IANAL, but last *I* heard, I had thought it took a judge and a search warrant to ORDER a university to allow someone to search their servers. Okay, so CMU did the search themselves. But when the HELL was the F-ing RIAA given the authority to ORDER such a search????
Or did they mearly *coerce* CMU into thought-policing actions???
This *REALLY* pisses me off!!!!
Arrogance such as this is downright microsoftian!
Somewhere, somebody, has given WAAAAYYYY too much power to these thugs. That person, or persons needs to be dragged out and (metaphorically) shot, or at least voted out of office.
So how the hell do you stop the RIAA from rampaging around like this, bullying the very universitys which are supposed to be the bulwarks of free sppech, freedom of expression, and freedom of information???
Doesn't RICO cover corrupy, power-mad, bullying organizations such as this. IANAL again, and I know RICO was meant to combat the mafia, but IIRC, other corrupt organizations have been prosecuted for racketeering under RICO before. Anyone know how such a suit is initiated? Writing congressmen I suppose. Although it would have to be an en masse campaign.
Since the RIAA is so intent on destroying the MP3 format, how about a class-action suit against them... by all the creators and users of MP3 software???
Or, perhaps, as was suggested earlier, MP3 should just be made into everyone's default sound format for EVERYTHING. Make it so ubiquiotous, that there'll be NO WAY to stop it.
In any event, there's got to be *some* way to bring these SOBs down...
john
Imagine all the people...
I currently work for a large University as
a Sysadmin/Programer, and it seems every few
weeks we get an email from the RIAA telling us
that a student is running an MP3 site and that
we need to shut them down.
On a personal level, it pisses me off. I see
nothing morally wrong with what the kids are
doing, and I know my collegues express the same
feelings, but we shut them down anyway, even if
it gives me a sick feeling in my stomac.
However, surprize inspections and cutting off
computer access is way extreme. Here we ask the
student to remove them. Then they are reported to
someone or other. Basically, you do it, you get a
slap on the wrist.
Students HAVE lost all computer access over it,
but only the ones who openly ignored us and
continued their activities. I think pulling
any network acess from a first time violator is
extremely harsh (even if it is just "Home Access")
I certainly hope these students complain and are
heard. "Surprize inspections" are just wrong.
(Then again...so is using University computers for
MP3 distribution...keep it on your own machine
god damnit)
Then again...I supose the upside is that when I
get the RIAA notice, I can check the site to see
if they have anything good before they get shut
down (I am not in charge of shutting them down
myself...im mostly just a programer)
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
And there's not a thing they can do about it. Support the artists who are trying to help decentralize the music industry.
I don't know why this sort of material should be copyrighted in the first place, I bet some people have remembered hearing music in the past and wished they cpuld get a copy of the song in some format and couldn't because it wasn't available to purchase anywhere. Maybe they would get lucky and catch it on the radio.
Personally I don't listen too much music but I do enjoy playing my emulated nintendo games and these are also considered illegal if you don't own the original. The only problem with this is that it is almost impossible to find a properly working original of some of the games I have come to love. Without video game roms I wouldn't be able to play these games anymore if I could purchase them I would but I can't. So I ask you aLL where does that leave other people with similar problems?
We need to make this type of information widely available in as many formats as possible to ensure that we can enjoy them into our later years.
DIE
Here, at California U of PA, we all just password our MP3 directories, but almost everyone has the same password, therefore, you can still trade MP3's, but it's secure.
No man is an island, But if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie them together, they make a pretty good raft.
First off, this happens every year with every college across the US. The RIAA complains, and college computer centers that normally couldn't care less about rules that are in place but which aren't enforced then have to go through public directories and punish those that are too stupid to make such things available without passwords. This is really common sense, people.
Secondly, my university did the same thing last year after the first quarter, as happens every year, and they suspended upwards of 30 students. These students lost their network connections for the remainder of the year with no chance at recovering them. This was a fully justified decision, and any whining on the part of those CMU students can really just shove it. This topic is one that has been exhausted around campuses for a LONG time, and I'm just disappointed we didn't make slashdot last year. =P
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
RIAA just asked them to check their students files to see if there WERE mp3's. they couldn't have known, since these files were only accessable inside the university (according to the article). no one was "made aware" of anything. they were instead asked to inspect, for themselves, the entire campus' files for copyright violations.
I think they made a pretty bad move. now they're setting themselves up to be liable for whatever is left behind that could possibly be illegal: mp3's, comments about a professor/Bill Gates/Bill Clinton/Bill Buddy Bob, anything...
Lea
This wouldn't be a problem if MP3 code was GPL'd. I guess these students haven't heard of encryption either.
I'm just pointing out the hypocritical thesis you put forth. It's okay to break the law if I'm stealing from a faceless corporation. I mean, the artist was a millionaire before they ever cut a record, right? So they must not have ever seen a penny of it. So F' em.
... back for the artists they've gambled on bothers you too much, buy from indies, and don't support them!
It just doesn't make sense to me to say that stealing is okay. Again, if paying Capitol, Sony, BMG, Arista,
Will the RIAA force the RA's of dorms to stop letting people borrow each other's CD's ro burn/record?
As in Phish, Live Dave Matthews, Live Bruce Hornsby, Live Greatful Dead...and your OWN music.
Those are allowed to be freely distributed.
RIAA did not make them aware of anything, according to the article. they asked the university to check and see if there was anything that they (the RIAA) would object to.
they were also not publically available to anyone BUT the university system. RIAA could not have known anything. they were just sending out scare letters, and CMU responded.
Lea
What the Chronicle article fails to mention, or made factual mistakes with:
1) These files were NOT on student websites. They were on students' own machines shared via Microsoft Networking.
2) Many of the computers found "in violation" had their shares passworded. However, CMU tried to guess passwords when it ran into them. So if they could guess it, they considered it public access.
3) The uproar is not so much about the school trying to reduce mp3 sharing over their network, but the manner in which they did it. The CMU Computing Code of Ethics clearly states, "Every member of Carnegie Mellon has two basic rights: privacy and a fair share of resources. It is unethical for any other person to violate these rights...On shared computing systems, all user files and directories are considered to be private and confidential. Only files which a user has explicitly made public (e.g., by placing in a "public" directory) should be considered open for general access. Accessing and using files in another person's directory when not expressly permitted to do so by the owner is a violation of that person's privacy" The Code further states "Loopholes in computer systems or knowledge of a special password should not be used to alter computer systems, obtain extra resources or take resources from another person". Clearly what CMU has done, by going into folders not marked as public and guessing passwords has violated their own Code of Ethics. That has gotten a lot of people pretty upset. They followed the rules but lost access anyway.
4. The students affected could reduce the time they lost network access by a few weeks by going to a stupid "education" seminar to hear why copyright infringement is bad, and then write some paper along those lines. I think those that did that get their access back on Nov 14, or something like that.
5. Computing Services sent out an email to the student body giving their side of the event. You can find the text here.
But if you password-protected your MP3 files, the RIAA/judge/etc. would never learn of their existence. If they did, it would probably (although, I suppose, not quite axiomatically...) indicate less-than-totally-secure web design, which would make you liable anyway. I guess a snooping sysadmin would be an exception, but limited obfuscation would prevent the obvious 'find / -name "*.mp3"'. In any event, your liability would probably correspond closely with your competence in security/obscurity. This seems fair to me.
Doctors amputate Turkish earthquake survivor's arm [This story contains video]
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
Make 'em fight copyright violators, not MP3 users.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I forgot to mention:
If you had a folder shared and they couldn't guess the password, if you said anywhere that you would give out the password upon request they killed your connectivity. Even if there was no copyright-infringing material there, but merely if it *seemed* that way! They simply assumed that there was if you said you would give out passwords like that. Of course no one would give passwords to Computing Services, so they couldn't check. For all the details check the Computing Services email message linked in my above post.
..they cracked down on people letting others borrow their CD's. Using the Universities hallways to traffic in copyright material, for shame.
+&x
i can see exactly where CMU is coming from - we run a large network here, and everyone gets a non-proxied static IP, so you can imagine the attempts we get... but we're a state school, and although the machines belong to the students, we own the network...
so we keep a very close eye... its our policy *never* to snoop data, but we browse publicly to the extent that any student can, and that the RIAA can...
honestly, we dont give two shits about porn, mp3's, or anything unless it overloads our network (and we have a whole different system to deal with folks running servers)...
the probkem is the RIAA: those bastards browse our networks, and when they find something, we get a letter demanding the name and info of the student handed over for prosecution!
the first time this happened, the letter made it to the president of the university... needless to say, he was 1/2 confused, 1/2 pissed...
we will never hand over that kind of info to the RIAA without a subpeona, but we dont want to get the kids in trouble...
so we make it very very clear that publicly sharing mp3's will get them in trouble, by having them sign stuff to get their account, and by shutting people off temporarily when we do find illegal stuff publicly shared, until they turn it off....
thats the key - temporarily - we're pricks about protecting ourselves, but we're not mean... in that sense i think CMU went a bit too far... but i totally understand where they're coming from...
> everybody should be in jail for speeding
7 /vehiclecertorig.html
Look, I travel WITHOUT
a) a driver's license
b) my car being registered with the government/state.
and I have never got a ticket for driving without a license, or been given a ticket for speeding.
How come?
Because I'm exercising my Right To Travel.
http://teaminfinity.com/~ralph/dl.html
http://www.lvdi.net/~willys/travel.htm
http://www.ironsoft.com/lp/driving.html
http://aero.net/silver/Driving.htm
I have an Internationals Drivers Permit.
Also the state doesn't have the Manufacturer's Certificate of Origin for my car, so I am completely out of their jurisidiciton.
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/441
You might want to check FACTS before spewing myths.
Cheers
I can assure you, the CMU Network Admins did not need much "bullying" to start looking around. They love doing that kind of stuff. An excuse to be a little more harsh is all they needed.
What are you talking about? MP3 code is not the issue. Nobody was in trouble for distributing encoders or algorithms.
The content is the issue. The fact is that songs are copyrighted, and it is illegal to spread them around.
Of course, I have a few MP3s myself, and I don't like the state of copyright law (principally with regard to the RIAA), but it is the law, and that is what it comes down to.
--
Max V.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Thought i'd mention that CMU has been doing this from time to time.
I know several people who go there/have gone there, and have heard about their unofficial yearly student file check for illegal material. last year, there were quite a few software piracy busts. of course, this begs the question: "Is this a privacy violation?"
Question: If my computer is connected to the college network, does that make my computer part of the network? Do the Admins have the right to look through my files if this is so?
If this is true, then doesn't AOL or any other ISP have the right to look at your files since you are dialed in and connected to their network?
I agree that if the mp3's were stored on the college's servers, then yea, they should be punished, but if the files were on personal computers, (located ON the campus, but in private rooms), shouldn't they have required some sort of permission to get to them?
"Why does every question lead to another question?"
I'm network admin (among other things) for a small part of a big company - I manage some 150 computers, with 120 programmers and 30 clerical staff.
Many of the people have internet access, and I have one rule - if it's illegal, it's intolerable. I won't even let you use my wires to download it then transfer it to a CD, or your own laptop. No funny business on my wires/disks, full stop.
However, I won't investigate your own, personal laptop. I will insist you install my antivirus software before you connect it to my network, but I won't poke around.
Machines owned by the company are an open book to me. Nothing illegal or unlicenced is allowed. Full stop. Because I'm liable.
If CMU investigated machines that were the private property of students, that's wrong; in that case, you've got to catch them in the act via a packet sniffer or something. However, if the files were resident on hard disks bought and paid for by CMU, then they had every right to investigate the legality of those files. Of course, it doesn't hurt to have a quiet word with the individuals concerned, instead of going in guns blazing...
--
Peter
I have a question...is it illegal to simply make MP3s of CDs I OWN and keep and don't distribute?
If not, can I be arrested by hanging my CDs on my front porch if somebody then takes them and copies them? Um, shouldn't it be THEM that get in trouble?
This is going a bit far. Really, I think RIAA and software companies use the "warez"-scare just to inflate their prices ("our product is so expensive because bad people are copying and not paying for it").
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The 4th branch of gov't! No pesky warrants needed! Just barge in and pillage and loot student's hardware. Who is the real pirate (in the true sense of the word)?
i cant beleive what i am hearing here. so is everyone saying that they are perfect and never did any illegal or copy any software or burn cd's illegally. what happened to those students is part of university life (for any that experienced it) and shouldn't be punished so harsh. so what if some students shared some songs so others at the university could access it. most students at college are broke cause of costs. what about the mp3 search engines that look for songs on ftp sites and people grab the song of their choice?!?!?! are they gong to crack down and sue everyone.
Say I set up a password protected network share of my legally encoded mp3 files so that I can listen to them anywhere on campus. Exactly how is this any different from physically carrying those cds to my friend's room?
Because we have to get paid for work. When my landlord joins your commie agenda and lets me live there for free, when the grocery store gives me free food, and when the gas station gives me free fuel, then maybe you can have my work for free. Until then, though, my employer's software comes with a license saying you can't spread it around. Violations of such a license is theft and it hurts people.
Wrong. Free software is about not being held hostage to someone else's maintenance whims; it's not about getting something for nothing. There are plenty of reasons for fighting Microsoft, but the fact that they charge money for their products is not one of them.
I am disappointed that CMU is turning out people with such a basic lack of understanding when it comes to economics and ethical fairness.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
In fact there is at least one case were all the files a person were sharing were legal MP3's but still was disconnected. He later had his connection restored but he was still punished for two days.
Notice this means you can be punished even if you did nothing wrong.
I can't believe this was moderated up.
m plaint
For the first time a machine has passed the Turing test maybe?
http://www-csag.cs.uiuc.edu/individual/pakin/co
Make your own complaints, get points!
By guessing passwords (even if they were easy ones), they were not observing their own privacy statements.
Not only were'nt they observing their privacy statement, they were certainly infringing computer crime laws. Makes me wonder, what's the difference between what they did and the reason why Mitnick was jailed???
Plus, they have no valid reason to do so; they could always have ASKED for the passwords first. And isn't the police, for instance, required to have a valid injunction to do that kind of thing? Hm ....
What, so "if you can pry it loose it's not nailed down?"
.MP3 pirates, if they were truly running a public site they knew what they were doing was wrong. HOWEVER, I could easily see someone making the read-only password for their own .MP3 directory "MP3" so they could remember it more easily. The fact that a password isn't a good one does not make it legal to break in.
If I leave a key under my doormat you're allowed to break into my house?
If my car isn't locked I wanted you to take it?
His point is completely valid. I'm not defending
Moreover, it isn't illegal to rip your own CDs onto MP3. It is only illegal to distribute them to other people who don't own the CD. If CMU was going to play copyright cop, it was their responsibility to monitor sites and record proof of illegal activity before taking action. Instead, they violated the privacy of the students without any real proof of wrongdoing apart from rumor and supposition.
Frankly, I think CMU was really stupid to agree to take responsibility for the contents of all the machines attached to the campus network. Thay don't control those machines, and in most cases can't monitor their contents. Now they're more liable to be sued successfully than before.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Or your right to move to another town without having to register. CMU was probably trying to protect their students. The RIAA tells them "do something about these MP3's or we will". Of course they'd like CMU to police since they don't have the manpower, but I'm sure the RIAA would be more than happy to charge a few students(not the university) in a fictional 'piracy ring' just to set an example. Now you've got these 19 year old kids with a criminal record. You think the RIAA would care? Think it would deter some people from posting MP3s? In all likelyhood these are CS students, and now every time they apply for a job they not only have to check the "ever been convicted of a felony?" box, but have to explain that the felony was piracy. You think a tech company is going to like that? Think they're going to give the applicant a chance to explain? So now at the age of nineteen, a kid gets blackballed from the career in the computer industry or a chance of getting gov't clearance because he posted LIMP BIZKIT on his homepage. Horrible Horrible CMU!
Record companies asked for it. Not only do they pressure bands to put out sub par records but they charge more for CD's when CD's cost less to make than tapes. If CD prices cost the same as tapes(they'd still be making more off CD's than tapes) I'd consider buying them but right now, they screw me I screw them. I'd rather send a donation to the band. Even if we blame the band for having one good song and 10 crappy ones on an album we can still blame the record company for not selling that 1 good song by itself for a couple of bucks. Distribution woes still falls squarely on the record company. BTW I find it odd that the music, movie and software industries whine so much about piracy when they have some of the largest profit margins of any industry.
I'm almost ashamed to admit that I'm an alumnus of CMU here, but...
I think they did the right thing. While a large number of people seem to be up in arms over the fact that the admin broke 'their own code of ethics', I don't think it's as cut and dried as that.
Nearly anyone who has browsed the net has occasionally run into sites that list MP3 sites.
Nearly all of those are ftp sites with user mp3 and password mp3 and allow you access to those collections (or portions of them, etc).
*IF* (and I say if, because I don't know the details), that was the 'simple password' that CMU's administration tried, then I would side with what I percieve as the administrations view that that password was not there to discourage public consumption of those resources, but merely to pay lip service to an agreement that the student wasn't really paying any attention to in the first place.
Given the text of the administrations letter (which some other poster linked to), I'd say my impression above is probably pretty accurate.
--JT
What in the world is your "full stop" nonsense?
And "your virus checker?" Is this a virus checker you coded yourself?
Or just some off-the-shelf product that you're calling your own?
Big deal. You run a network. You're not some god of IT. You're a suit.
That's nothing to be cocking your eyebrows about, hitching up your pants about, and pretending like you're speaking the law of the land.
As a sysadmin for Univ. of Texas' Electrical Engineering department, I have to say that it serves them right. Our university computer services agreement says, more or less, that any use of unlicensed copyrighted material on university computers is unlawful and that the university reserves the right to put the smack down. In addition, the policy for our labs, which users sign when receiving accounts, states that our computers are to be used primarily for educational use.
Why be a hardass? Because these policies require me, as an admin, to uphold our end of these agreements. We run the possibility of being the unlucky winners of a software audit if someone higher up believes that we're not in compliance. This is just as painful as the IRS equivalent. As a result, we have sent students to SJS (the UT system's Council of Doom) for trial for doing these fool things.
I admit, I have my collection of MP3s. But I don't draw attention to the fact by serving them publicly and I definitely don't keep them on the University's network.
I'm sick of the posts that go something like "CMU was violating their rights" or "the RIAA put them up to it." Get over it, folks.
Network access in your dorm isn't a right---it's a privelidge. At virtually every university with dorm network access, in order to gain access you must sign a "contract" or at least agree to some sort of AUP. Pirating software (music included) is definate breaching of that AUP/contract. You pay the price. Period. It's a shame those kids didn't get reported to the RIAA or law enforcement. The problem is that large private universities want to avoid bad press in any way possible; "there certainly aren't any illegal activities going on at OUR campus... look over THERE!" say school officials.
I digress. There are RULES. The rules are there for a reason. You may disagree with the reason, but you still have to follow them or you pay the price. If you don't like the rules, talk to the people who make them. If you talk in large enough numbers, things change. That's how America works. Last I checked, CMU was in America.
(And don't even get started with the "well, people are going to pirate mp3's anyway, why should the school stop them?" because it's NOT the university's decision whether it's illegal or not; it's the federal government. Universities stop underage drinking on campus, stopping pirating is the same thing.)
-Chris
Funny, just ran into this program a few days ago. Napster is at (http://www.napster.com/). You point it at your mp3 repository and it registers that with all of the other users that are online.
My apologies to any who interpret this as an ad hominem attack. I'm trying to attack the behavior, not the person.
is this an invasion of the students privacy/rights?
What about the copyright holders rights? They made an effort to create intellectual property, these students blatantly steal it, and we harp on the criminals rights?
While I agree that criminals rights are extremely important, I think we should look at the victims rights too!
-F
Since CMU developed LYCOS, and still receives licensing fees from them, they indirectly make money off the bootleg MP3 sites by LYCOS hosting one of the premiere MP3 search engines and selling ads on it.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a way that CMU/Lycos could appease the music industry by pointing out that they are taking a hard line against MP3 copyright violators under their control.
Lowend IDE CDROM burners are CHEAP these days.
If you really want to be able to exploit your mp3's for personal use anywhere in the world, whynot just burn them to disc?
It certainly beats hauling around 7-10 times as many discs and potentially loosing the originals.
For those who are wondering, some of the students who were caught were running servers on Network Neighborhood, and some of them had the directories with MP3's password protected. So while it would have been agenst the rules for another student to access them without permission, staff who were checking Network Neighborhood went into them.
Yea sure. You try explaining how state law doesn't apply to you.
1:The officer won't care - I'd be willing to bet you won't be ticketed, you'll be arrested too. (I'd bet you're one of those morons who doesn't have insurance either, eh?)
2:The judge won't care how many URLS you throw at him, he'll throw several different law books back at you and your lawyer (and remember, "The lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client").
3:The big guy named bubba you share your cell with won't care - he'll just thank you nightly for not paying your stupid car tabs.
Get real - you're violating state law in all 50 states. Just because you can find a frigging URL that says otherwise means nothing.
someone sees a gig or so in my /mp3/ directory and busts my arse...
The RIAA's spreading of the idea "mp3 == illegal" is sheer FUD and must be stopped, there is nothing inherently illegal about the compression and file format, for fucks sake.
i must say that im rather disturbed, yet nor surprised at this occurance. as a frequent user of the cmu network myself, i made use of these servers and downloaded my share of music and games.. files and movies. it was all kind of open. The funny thing is, this is DURING the school year. During the summer when all the precollege and governors school's kids come in, there is rampant piracy. All my friends shared their mp3's, movies and warez. It was just the thing to do. CMU IT has previously deactivated student accounts for such conduct but not to this measure. I think that while this IS wrong, it should not have led to the actions taken by the administration. I mean, sure ive been bad, i downloaded, but that doesent mean i did it with malicous intent to harm someones elses profits. -neal. nshyam@choate.edu
1. CMU apparently went awfully far to enforce the law. IANAL, but I'm guessing they went too far. I recall a case in the mid '70's where the PA Supreme Court threw out a defiant trespass case against some antiFBI protestors at Muhlenberg College. Their legal case was based largely on old "company town" law originally written to limit the power of employers like coal mines who owned the homes, stores, etc., where their employees lived.
2. These students are almost certainly criminals who stole and/or knowingly owned, used, and distributed stolen material.
Many of the comments here complain correctly and vehemently, if often ignorantly, about the first issue. But only a few acknowledge the second. Why don't I see posts describing slashdotter's condemnation of theft? Why do I read posts about how to get around efforts like CMU's instead of what CMU can do legitimately to prevent criminal activity on its network? Why don't I read about what slashdotters can to themselves to reduce this criminal behavior? Why do I feel I have to post this anonymously? Frankly, it's more than depressing.
I know you don't quite grasp what I'm trying to say, so I'll make it easy for you: Copyright law is not the ideal way to run a society, especially one in which the students are bled for all their money like in CMU. There were very very few people there who had enough money left over (after financial aid determined how poor you should be) to buy CDs. And forget $50 for a game when you could eat for two weeks or not. You obviously have no clue what you are suggesting; in fact people simply couldn't work full time and go to college; because the classes were pretty darn tough. I saw people try to work full time at CMU - and go crazy doing it (if they weren't crazy to begin with.) So don't lecture me on being utopian!
You do what you need to do, so stealing and borrowing entertainment was a necessity. I've graduated - I don't go downloading WaRez now; I've got plenty of money to go to buy tunes for my car cd if I wish. But back then, you could forget it. And people in such a poverty position, many who couldn't find the time or transportation to go to a CD store (the nearest Sam Goody is 3 miles away) won't bother. And since few had cars, but most spent all their time on computers, downloading MP3s was pretty darn natural.
That's how it was.
You can take your idiotic "morality" and stuff it up your you know what. It's like saying to people marooned on a desert island that it's wrong to not do their taxes!
Oh and one more thing; for better or worse, the free software movement is about freedom, licensing, intellectual property, and copyright issues. So my landlord gets paid, but I know in my heart the direction society needs to be going.
-Benjamin Shniper
Sounds like a pimply-faced kid rationalizing why it's okay for him to steal.
While many people cite piracy as a "loss of revenue" situation, it very often ends up being free marketing.
Just wanted to point out that not all software developers terribly mind.
On the other hand, if a corporation decided to rip me off, THAT I would mind a LOT. But personal use hurts very few people. Mind you, maybe I'm just biased, working for a cool company that likes releasing stuff "free for personal use".
I would try this but they have explicitly outlawed any kind of packet sniffer on the dorm connections... No hubs, no sniffers, etc....
Of course enforcing this gets hard...so I'm not too worried.
Let's see.... My MP3 player (a linux box stuffed in a cd-player case with a lcd display and I.R. remote control interface) that has a network card so I can upload my own personal music to it so I can listen to it (Upload via FTP) would be a violation?? By their definitions this would be the case! I think those students need to hire lawyers and sue the hell out of the university for invasion of privacy, hacking their computer, and punishment for no reason.(YES no reason at all!) Let's see those hacking laws applied evenly or let's throw them out! (HA!)
I'm a fan of Nine Inch Nails, and Trent's latest release ("The Fragile") is a two CD set. I was able to pick this up for 22$ Canadian (multiplied by .67, puts it just shy of 15$ US).
;-).
:-) (But this would let people decide if they liked the CD before buying, which is a no-no.)
That's not too bad. Now, for whatever band put out that "Hey now, you're an All Star" song (20 s of it is interesting in the same way a wav clip from the Simpsons is interesting, otherwise it SUCKS) probably has a padded CD that I'd not touch (not that I buy many CDs
The thing is, since about 1994, the record industry has been focusing on One Hit Wonders, instead of REAL bands that do real music. Most of what they produce is formulaic, at best. See: NSync and Backstreet boys (I can't hear a difference). Heh, in the interview with Trent (archived at www.nineinchnails.net), he talks about people asking him for a release because music in the latter half of the 90s SUCKED! (It mostly does).
Basically: I support MP3ing the one song those one hit wonders make because you'll probably only like it a little bit, and probably not listen to it after a year. As for real bands, buy their CDs, encode them, and preserve them. Those CDs are easy to scratch, and might be worth something someday.
As a side note, one thing I really hate is when companies will promote one song on a CD from a good band (selling them using the One Hit Wonder formula). Sure, Blackhole Sun, Barbie Girl, and We're In This Together are good, but let the CD stand on its own. Play more than the one song, damnit
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
The Vermillion Fruit: Textual semiotic theory and MP3's
Rudolf Long
Department of Future Studies, University of California
Wilhelm S. W. Ashwander
Department of Ontology, Miskatonic University, Arkham, Mass.
1. Textual semiotic theory and MP3
In the works of Rushdie, a predominant concept is the distinction between feminine and masculine. The characteristic theme of Ardois-Bonnot's[1] critique of MP3 is the role of the observer as writer.
"Society is fundamentally responsible for militarist ideology," says Sontag. The subject is contextualised into a dialectic Marxism that includes sexuality as a reality. Therefore, the primary theme of Wilson's[2] model of dialectic Marxism is not, in fact, deconstruction, but neodeconstruction.
"Society is impossible," says Baudrillard; however, according to la Tournier[3] , it is not so much society that is impossible, but rather the failure of society. Any number of theories concerning MP3 exist. In The Name of the Rose, Eco reiterates textual semiotic theory; in Foucault's Pendulum, however, Eco reiterates the cultural paradigm of expression. But Bataille uses the term 'textual semiotic theory' to denote a postcultural paradox.
The premise of dialectic Marxism implies that consensus must come from the masses, given that textual semiotic theory is valid.
In a sense, Faustroll[4] holds that we have to choose between capitalist nihilism and Marxist capitalism. Derrida suggests the use of MP3 to transgress the boundaries of reality. However, the subject is interpolated into a textual semiotic theory that includes language as a whole. The main theme of the works of Eco is the difference between narrativity and society. The within/without distinction which is a central theme of The Name of the Rose is also evident in The Name of the Rose. However, Mensonge uses the term 'subsemioticist dialectic theory' to denote the dialectic, and subsequent futility, of precapitalist sexual identity.
The subject is contextualised into a dialectic Marxism that includes consciousness as a totality. It could be said that many situationisms concerning textual semiotic theory may be discovered.
Lacan uses the term 'MP3' to denote not, in fact, discourse, but neodiscourse. Therefore, Habermas's critique of dialectic Marxism states that class has significance. Hatchjaw[5] implies that we have to choose between postmodern narrative and textual semiotic theory.
2. Eco and Adornian aesthetics
If one examines textual semiotic theory, one is faced with a choice: either accept dialectic Marxism or conclude that the significance of the artist is deconstruction. Saussure promotes the use of textual semiotic theory to challenge class divisions.
In the works of Eco, a predominant concept is the distinction between closing and opening. If MP3 holds, the works of Eco are not postmodern. The characteristic theme of Abian's[6] analysis of MP3 is the role of the reader as participant. An abundance of theories concerning the bridge between art and society exist. In a sense, Baudrillard uses the term 'the subpatriarchialist paradigm of reality' to denote the defining characteristic, and some would say the nothingness, of dialectic sexual identity.
"Class is part of the meaninglessness of truth," says Sartre; however, according to Huges[7] , it is not so much class that is part of the meaninglessness of truth, but rather the fatal flaw of class. The primary theme of the works of Rushdie is a self-justifying paradox. However, the subject is interpolated into a dialectic Marxism that includes culture as a reality.
But Lyotard suggests the use of MP3 to modify and deconstruct sexual identity. The stasis, and eventually the rubicon, of textual semiotic theory intrinsic to Midnight's Children emerges again in Satanic Verses, although in a more mythopoetical sense. Thus, the premise of dialectic Marxism holds that reality is capable of significant form.
It could be said that Buxton[8] suggests that we have to choose between textual semiotic theory and textual discourse.
The subject is interpolated into a MP3 that includes language as a whole. But the main theme of Humphrey's[9] essay on submaterial semanticism is the absurdity, and thus the paradigm, of posttextual sexual identity.
Several theories concerning dialectic Marxism may be revealed. Therefore, textual semiotic theory holds that academe is problematic, given that the premise of MP3 is valid.
The copyright holders have no 'rights' as such. They have a grant of monopoly. Whereas privacy is considered to be an inherent right. Clearly, the inherent/natural/moral/civil right should have precedence over a state monopoly grant.
You just don't get it.
You would give up your own liberty in favor of the profit of some faceless corporation that would literally rape you if they thought they could get away with it and profit from it.
Funny how normally there is a huge uproar when a University acts against student freedoms for the sake of a corporation. I happen to think this is a really disgusting example. Why should CMU buckled under to pressure from the RIAA? What power does the RIAA have? They going to threaten to stop selling CDs to CMU students? Give me a break. RIAA just wants to protect their collusion-supported "monopoly" - go have the FTC bust them up.
Can your IM do this?
Why are you defending a faceless corporation's ability to sell CRAP to consumers and not be held accountable?
Hold 'software' makers and merchants to the UCC in a strict fashion and this 'motivation' or 'excuse' to pirate disappears.
Why should only the 'little guy' be constrained by moral or legal concerns?
Instead of using names like "MP3", use names like "MP3$" or "blahblah$".
Then it doesn't show up in the browse list, but you can still access it remotely.
Obviously don't use mp3$, as that can be guessed.
Amendment 4 - PROBABLE CAUSE The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
No wonder campus rape and murder has increased.
In addition to rape, murder and theft, Pirates also like to listen to music, and play video game.
Now they have gone tooo far.
To the plank!!
Read it again. The students put the files in their public folders, not on their private hard disk or under password protection.
If you're gonna grow marijuana, don't do it on your front lawn!
Matt Slot / Bitwise Operator / Ambrosia Software, Inc.
You CMU students may not care about your rights,
but I can guarantee that if somebody accuses me
of a crime, they had damn well better be prepared
to present their evidence before a magistrate,
according to my constitutionally guaranteed right
to due process of law.
They accused me of a crime and already punished me, you say? The judge will hear about that in
very clear terms, and I will have grounds to seek
damages.
Not one of these 71 students who has been deprived of their constitutional right to due process upon
being accused of a crime, has sought a hearing?
This is NOT about RIAA or MP3. It's about being
accused of a crime by a private party, with that party taking punitive action. This is activity that we delegate to proper authority, not to private parties.
But if you want to accuse me of a crime, you'd better have a uniformed peace officer there to do it for you. Which police agency took this action?
Which judge ruled that it was acceptable to terminate these student accounts?
Oh well, these kids don't care enough to really fight, they just complain. Daddy's money will probably get them a DSL line in less than the 4
weeks that their accounts are suspended.
"when somebody says to us, 'We have a problem
with members of your community violating
copyright laws,' we have to do something."
Actually, you've only "got to" do something if that somebody is a judge who has signed an order.
Otherwise the only thing you've "got to" do is die
and pay taxes, in no particular order.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
It's about copyright infringement. The RIAA probably threatened a lawsuit. There is no such thing as freedom to free music.
They weren't all public files. Some of them were private. The network admins were guessing passwords. And they didn't check to see if the MP3s were illegal, warn the people, or even tell them they were getting disconnected.
Anyone with a private directory and legal MP3s that got checked would have been disconnected under CMU's sweep.
Besides, if I guess passwords to someone's drives and look around without a search warrant, I go to jail. Why is it different for the CMU net admins.
Being from a student in a country in Europe, this whole thread surprises me a great deal. At my university we have a campus network as well. (A nicer one one then Carnegie Mellon, but that is beside the point)Everybody here has shares. It is considered rude not to share. The only times our version of the RIAA have gone to the police was when somebody was stupid enough to advertise his warez for sale in national newsgroups. Otherwise it is almost impossible, because our laws require that they have a good reason before they get a warrant. What I really would like to know is the following.
1. What makes it so easy to violate the privacy of peoples rooms on campus? (here you need a search warrant)
2. Would the same construction as we have here, with students running it and acting as an ISP work in the States?
Use Adsense for Charity
...my freedom to create and experience good music in favor of some perverted notion of "liberty" you seem to believe in (where liberty == the right to loot the fruits of other people's intellectual efforts with impunity).
Go back to China, pal. Your friends in the Red Guard are waiting for you.
The user agrees that Microsoft Corporation, TM, retains full use and ownership of all intelectual property enableled by Windows,TM, software, TM. Because of this property right overrides all others, we have made sure that nothing on your personal computer can be concealed from us, or anyone else. The term "Privacy", which sounds like piracy, as used by the popular press is a fiction and will not be found anywhere else in this user agreement.
There you have it surrender your creativity and consume! Microsoft and the RIAA, which sued the Girls Scouts of America for singing a copyrighted song around the capmfire, are birds of a feather.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I sure get a kick out of how people get all defensive when the obvious fact that they are stealing is pointed out to them.
First of all, if you listen only to net "radio" stations that have a right and license to broadcast all of the music they use, then great, no problem. However, if your are listening to streaming broadcasts of illegally distributed MP3 files, then you are just as guilty as the person broadcasting (at least for a moral, if not legal perspective).
Some of the other arguments are even more laughable though. The idea that only food, cars, etc can be stolen, is pretty funny. I mean, why should taking food count as stealing. It's way overpriced (just like software and music supposedly are), and people need food a lot more than they need music and software.
Or how 'bout the "I wouldn't buy it anyway, because I don't have the money" argument. This is just as funny. There are lots of things I can't afford, but that doesn't mean I can just take them if I want them. I would love to be able to talk to the people I know in England any time I feel like it, but I can't afford to. Since there's no way I would actually pay for all that phone time, it's OK for me to just steal it, right?
People get it through your head! Just because the reproduction cost of something is basically free does not mean you can justify stealing it.
"They were well within their rights to search the systems, whether password protected or not. The students have no grounds to complain about anything." Why would the university have the legal right to search the students' computers? I'm sorry but unless you show up at my door with a search warrent and a badge, you can't see what I have on my computer. Period. Now, the university can deny access to their network for, more or less, any reason since it is their network but searching computers? Do you think a private ISP like AOL should ahve permission to search your computer whenever they feel like it (including trying to guess/crack your password)? I can tell you that if my ISP ever tries to break into any of my boxes they will catch hell for it and lose my bussiness. The ONLY people that have the right to conduct a search of your personal effects are the police (or FBI, et al) and only if they have a search warrent. You need to remember that the RIAA has no legal authority of any kind. They are just another activist group like the ACLU. They can bring forth a lawsuit like anyone else but they themselves have no legal authority.
and before that I copied tapes. Yes you remember tapes. I burn CDs and own emulators. The companies distributing this stuff retail are way too greedy. Not to mention it's hard to find good music locally. For instance the group BOA. I love their music but since the local radio stations don't run it into the ground like ricky martain teh CD cannot be found. SO the answer is MP3. I think the owners of MP3s should be praised not punnished. Getting MP3s is no different than my freeware copy of widows95.(Joke)
Don't forget its not your network, it belongs to CMU and you are just using it. So that means you are subject to whatever rules apply.
No litterally. Seriosly I hope someone died for that.
see above, if i can guess it, so can the hackers and the RIAA... but i believe this is tresspassing, and akin to picking a lot and saying 'it was a crappy lock', which is clearly illegal... CMU went too far here...
Just because somebody puts a password of 'mp3' on their share does *not* mean it's classified as private/password-protected. This is a very typical and normal way of setting up MP3 shares on anonymous FTP sites or Windows shares and, in my opinion, is essentially the same as "public access."
Don't think of it as a crappy lock, think of it as a code-word required for entry that's general knowledge. If the students really were protecting their files, they'd have used a real password. Their intent was to set it up for public access, which tips the scales against them. I believe there is a legal definition for 'password protected', and the intent of the owner to restrict access is a requirement. This is not the case here.
like some other schools, this email should have been sent out before the event, so that the kids would not have publicly shared the stuff!
At my previous university, in order to get campus ethernet, you had to agree to terms and conditions that required, in part, compliance with copyright laws. This should have been adequate warning. Just because some of your l33t hax0r mp3 friends are doing it and not getting caught doesn't mean you won't get caught either. You will have a hard time finding any of those students that didn't know what they were doing was illegal.
Not to sound evil here, but the university can do whatever the hell they like with their network connections. They don't *have* to have any proof of wrong-doing to nuke a connection. If they were in fact overzealous in their efforts, they were no doubt trying to send a "message" to the rest of the student body that these things won't be tolerated. The students in question will probably have their connections restored in short order.
LOL!
The CDs and the music would be the club's property, wouldn't it? Or does it fall under the clause that multiple members could listen to exactly the same music at the same time, thus making it a copyright infringement, because we only bought one CD?
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.
You expect your university to cover for you when you do illegal things? There's no reason CMU would *not* want to accomodate the RIAA here. If I were running a university, and I was told a bunch of my students were breaking the law, I would naturally try to help locate and bring them to justice. I wouldn't go off and say "OK, we'll look into it," and then snicker quietly as I let my students continue breaking copyright law.
Universities tend to turn a blind eye to this sort of thing, much to the charign of developers and other copyright holders, but I would *certainly* expect a university to follow up and do something about a legitimate and explicit complaint.
The only troubling thing here--and it is quite troubling--is that they conducted inspections "at the order of" the RIAA.
I believe the article explicitely said, "...at the behest of..." This is hardly the same thing. From the article, it appears that the RIAA sent a blanket letter to several dozen universities about the ongoing problems of illegal MP3 distribution. CMU, upon receiving this, decided to stop turning a blind eye to it and start enforcing their school policies against violating copyright laws.
We don't know the contents of those letters, but it surely wasn't anything specific. It probably outlined the RIAA's concern over MP3's and how common it was to find these things distributed from university ethernet hosts. CMU took the next logical step.
If I were a university, I would be more concerned with my image of harboring a bunch of l33t MP3/warez-trading kids in my dorms than being overzealous in my *internal* conflict/legal resolution methods.
I hate to turn this into a discussion about piracy, however: Does anyone REALLY believe that the music/software/video industry would lower the prices of their products if piracy was eliminated? I sure don't. The price of a product is not related to how cheap/profitable it is to manufacture. Its related to what people are willing to pay. These companies are making billions of dollars, which tells them that their products, overpriced as they may seem, aren't overpriced enough that people don't buy them. In fact, they buy more of that stuff than they ever have. Im not pro-piracy, but the 'if we stopped piracy, prices would be much lower' argument is not valid.
First, to clear up misconceptions -- As I see it, the files that were found were being kept on the students' own computers, and simply shared over the CMU intranet with Microsoft file sharing (Or samba or whatever). In the past, CMU would occasionally just measure bandwith to each computer, and if they see one computer that is getting hit a lot, they'll investigate, and if that person has MP3's/Warez/ in public (i.e. non-passworded) folders, CMU would ask the student to remove that stuff from public folders, and perhaps cut off their access if they felt like it. (On a side note, someone mentioned that computer accounts were cut off if any type of hacking was noticed from someone's computer - this is true, even if the hacker was simply using the computer as a bounce point to hack someone else's computer. If this happened to you, you could simply go to network services and tell them that your computer was hacked - they would reinstate your network access as soon as you secured your computer a bit)
The thing that disturbs me here is that someone else mentioned that when CMU was doing this surprise inspection, they would guess passwords on passworded folders, and if they were able to guess it, and the folder had copyrighted material in it, then the network access would be cut. To me, this seems like a major invasion of privacy. I would go so far as to say that random guessing of passwords on a folder that is passworded could be considered a form of a password hacking attempt. Everything I remember from people's reports of discussions with network services at CMU and Dean Fowler seemed to lead to the fact that if a folder was passworded, than it was considered private. Just because it has an easy-to-guess password doesn't mean it's public - it just means the person who set it wanted to make it easy to remember.
One thing I find amusing about this is that one of the students at CMU used to have an search engine that indexed the massive CMU intranet, which enabled students to search for files they wanted (One result of this is that it made searching for MP3s easy to do). This student was forced to remove this functionality from his website (run on his computer), for the reason (among others) that the spider that did the searching could be considered an invasion of privacy - EVEN THOUGH it didn't even try to guess passwords, as network services supposedly did when doing their surprise inspection. Keep in mind - this reason was debated by the student who wrote the intranet spider, and I'm not sure what came of it.
One other thing I find funny (quote from article)Network services had to know there were MP3s shared in directories like this - most of the students knew. They aren't that naive - they have just chosen to ignore this until the RIAA barked louder.
You're right, but having a README.txt file on a public share saying "The password to my 'MP3' share is 'MP3'. Leech away!" doesn't help the students at all.
I do believe you misunderstand my friend. What gives the copyright holders any LESS rights then the average citizen?
/.? No. MP3 is just the nice buzzword of the year, along with IPO.
The RIAA is not a complete monopoly and do not con'troll' everything, or we wouldn't see sites like mp3.com where you can get LEGIT mp3's from artists who are publishing on a new medium.
And who the fsck said anything about a 'state monopoly grant'??? You're saying the RIAA is a government tool and somehow, through selling CD's and attempting to protect their own copyrighted material, they're trying to make off with our rights AND our money?
Noone rights were violated in this situation. If the network shares were there for anyone to see, then it's hardly illegal searching. That's like you saying I'm tresspassing by going into a public washroom. As for the rights of the copyright holders, they have every right to make protect their investment.
MP3s are not the issue. MP3s distributing copyrighted material are. MP3s are merely the medium, like the argument that a gun itself is not illegal, but using it to shoot someone is. If these students were passing around bootleg CD's, would this have made
.... when the first slashdotter becomes president (hey, it's gotta happen someday).
And promptly has that sorry pack of sons of b*tches hauled into court and prosecuted under the Racketeer Influnced and Corrupt Orginazations act.
Perhaps a petition to have them prosecuted sooner?
And how about all the other corperate bullies who want to restrict the freedom of information and turn the internet into their own executive stomping ground?
String 'em all up.
Oh, and hows about 8 years of presidential pardons for anyone thr RIAA tries to prosecute? Pretty sweet.
BTW.
Don't blame CMU. That's really shortsighted. Look to the real fascists in RIAA to place blame upon.
From the much vaunted Code of Ethics (in addition to the public/private clause floating around):
On rare occasions, computing staff may access others' files, but only when strictly necessary for the maintenance of a system or in active pursuit of serious security or abuse incidents.
This was indeed a rare occasion and, at least to CMU, this was a serious abuse incident. People are quick to point out that CMU broke the rules, but being skeptical, I read the whole privacy statement and found this line. This line right here, which students (I'm assuming) agreed to as part of agreeing to policy, gives them the right to access those files as part of their 'sweep'.
I don't think it's a great thing, what CMU did, but I think people are directing attention away from the real issue which is that people were breaking the law and got caught. Yes, it's rather fascist and if the government did this to me (and who's to say they haven't already), I'd be in an uproar, but this is a private institution that runs a private network. If you break the law on it, damned if they won't bust your ass for it. People need to read all of the terms when they sign up, not just the parts that they think will let them get away with what they want on their own personal machines.
Guess what people. These students abused the system and the system called them on it by their own rules. There are 179 kids right now who aren't in trouble and are laughing at the other 71.
p.s. (because I've seen this a couple of times)
Borrowing CDs is not copyright infringement anymore than borrowing a book is. Copying a CD and giving it away (which is very akin to making an MP3 and distributing it) is copyright infringement, just like xeroxing a book and giving it away ain't legal, either.
Just thought I'd get that off my chest.
Like many slashdot readers, I've been using computers since the Trash80 days. I also have been a musician for years, and have many ties with professional musicians and industry people here in NYC where I live. Having seen the rise of pirated MP3 trading and been a hotline user for sometime, as well as knowing many high level record execs, publishing execs, producers, and musicians with gold records on their walls, I think I have a fairly broad view of both the recording industry's arguments against pirating MP3's, and the pirates reasons for trading them.
Steve Albini wrote an excellent article that many of you may have seen on the problem with music. Basically, if a band sells 250,000 copies of an album, which doesn't even make it gold, the band makes 12,000 and the industry (lawyers, managers, roadies, bookers, producers, labels, radio promoters, etc.) nets about 1,000,000. (the 3 million dollars richer he mentions in his article is gross, not net.)
For those of you who disagree with this, I could mention a few rock stars I know who have jobs, artists with priority records out on major labels who temp between tours, and people who have headlined at Madison Square Garden who now work 5 days a week to pay their rent.
The real money for musicians is in mechanical royalties, which is basically publishing. Artists get money when an MP3 is legitimately downloaded, a song is played on the radio, or when they get something into a soundtrack (that's the real money) Most artists who sign to major labels do a publishing deal whereby they take an advacnce from a large publishing company like BMG or EMI in exchange for mechanical royalties. It's a bit of a gamble - if you think you're going to have a radio hit that gets in every soundtrack, you're better off not taking their money
Now, the RIAA often markets its arguments towards MP3 pirates as being: don't harm the artists you love. By downloading the MP3s off the 'net, you are cutting into artist royalties.
For an artist on an indie label that has a better royalty rate and distribution plan, this is absolutely true. If you download an artist from Touch & Go, Matador, Jade Tree, etc. you are in fact harming the artists, many of whom don't get the big publishing advance to live on. But in the majors, where a recording advance is a big loan, and royalty rates are a joke, and record companies are trying to break artists to commercial radio stations that are now big conglomerates with shrinking playlists, and the retail overhead is absurd, and legal fees often come out of the bands fund, how big of a dent are you making?
The real impact is what cuts into the record company's bank account. Now, when I go to Tower Records, and bands i've never heard of have their debut CD's for sale at 18 bucks a pop, I am not inclined to gamble that kind of money. I want to spend that money knowing what I'm getting, because most of the time major label debuts are boring because they are tailored to be pitched to commercial radio stations and promoters. However, these stations are now owned by conglomerates. These big companies find their subsidiary stations easier to manage when they have shorter playlists. THis is why you hear Bush, Metallica, Foo Fighters, and nothing else on the radio these days. There is a barrier of entry to new artists. I might hear a new major label artist if I go to a show and their label paid the headlining act to allow the new band they want to break to have an opening slot. But, for the most part, I think that today signing to a major label ensures limited promotional possibilities. Commercial radio can be written off as an option, which leaves touring and having your song played at Urban Outfitters, which is useless because nobody there will know who you are. Maybe a soundtrack if your publisher/manager has some clout. A publicist can help get you in magazines, but that's publicity, not getting your music out there. Therefore, the only real other promotional option for new bands on a major label is the internet.
And lets face it - how many of you who have downloaded free MP3s have been to Elektra Records website, or Virgin Records Website, or Sony 550 Records website? I'll bet hotline gets more traffic than those sites. And if you're connected to a fast server getting your pirate MP3s, aren't you inclined to check out songs by bands you've heard about but don't want to gamble 18 bucks on? And if you like it, aren't you inclined to perhaps see them live? Maybe buy the complete CD? Maybe even some merchandise (another big money makers for bands?)
Many people sign million dollar record deals and nobody ever hears their records, which wind up in the bargin bin if they're lucky. At least a pirated MP3 is a way that they can be heard. They won't make any money if their record goes gold anyway, from recording royalties. While MP3 downloads do cut into publishing, radio stations don't pay any less money now when they play a song on the radio than before MP3 pirating got to be big. Therefore, I conclude with the idea that Pirated MP3s help the artist and only hurt the industry when they are on a major label
The RIAAs ears are owned by the major labels. What I think the rise of pirate MP3s will do is force the labels to reconsider the inefficiant business model they try to force artists through before they spit them out. I think that the students at CMU were actually doing the major label artists they encoded a big favor, and that they were harming indie artists.
thereminjames
Good lord, get real. The artists don't give a shit if some university kids are listening to free music. Its the monopolistic attitudes of the 6 music produceing companies that are kicking up the fuss. They have been over charging for years for cd's. Do you know how much it costs them to make a copy of a cd to sell?? Or how much more they charge the consumers. Get real. Besides, the majourity of artists that are getting their cd's ripped are top 40 bands and sorry if I don't care about them making 40 million this year as opposed to 45 million. Also, if its a small band who needs my support and I like them I'll buy the cd.
Walk into the admins office @ nite, and read ALL the text files on his pc......... or publish info publically.... if I were still into the mp3 scene, I would have a linux box, configured as such to #A allow only local root #B prevent ANY non vital daemons from running, #3 Monitor the machine for access attempts, and #4 dont dl all the damn mp3s in 1 nite, 10 a day or something is WELL under the limits of normal traffic, "Carry a penny out of the bank and nothing happens, carry an entire bag of money out... and watch the situation unfold" a quote from bi0drain 98
Think about it. Who's in control of the music industry. We have joe artist who writes songs. We have EMI inc. EMI says, hey Joe, that one song you wrote sounds great. We want to put it on a cd. Joe says great. I don't have much more. They say "Well, according to this contract you have to provide us with 10 more songs in two weeks. So thats your problem." He puts out that good song and then a bunch of shit to go with it. Thats the nature of the industry until that artist gets to the point that he doens't have to put crap out to satisfy the companies cuz the customers love him. But really by that point the artist has the control and he's already established. But yea, you're dumb if you think the quality of the artists cd's just has to do with the artist himself. Really dumb.
The article doesn't exactly get it right (of course, it's from the Chronicle of Higher Education, so technical accuracy probably isn't to be expected). These files were all on students' personal computers, and shared via Windows networking. Furthermore, many of them were password protected, although only those folders which the university deemed to be "not really" password protected--ones with password "mp3", or with instructions on how to get the password in the readme--were broken into.
Frankly, I think the best analogy I've seen for this was the poster a few threads back who said that this was the same as busting students for using the university's hallways to share cds from room to room. Of course, this analogy misses the rather important point that mp3s tend to leave copies when they're borrowed, unlike cds. Still, the fact is that unlike the implications of using ~/public_html folders on university servers, the only CMU resource used is its internal network bandwidth--not university server space nor internet bandwidth--and that the files are only available to those members of the university who have a password to the folder--not the general public at large, by a long shot.
*AHEM* let me clear my throat. All cmu students received an official e-mail telling us what has happened with this network sweep. Yes they did guess some passwords, butthey only guessed some very obvious ones (like CMU, and MP3, and anonymous or the name of the folder), and they got busted if they had the passwrod posted on the network. I do not see this as an invasion of privacy, because stupid idiots that make obvious passwords, and post their passords on the netowrk, deserve to get their network privilages taken away. Lets not make computing services out to be evil here. First of all, the only reason they did this was because they had the RIAA breathign down their backs. I have met the head of computing services, he is a really cool guy, and he did not want to do this. Second of all, they are giving back the network access after a while. So take it from a CMU student, when I say, what they did was perfectly legit, and people should not have problems with this
Overall, Computing Services probably was legal in its actions, but they were pushing it and they realize that. At the workshop, it was made clear that future crackdowns will be handled differently--students with illegal content will be given 48 hours' notice before being disconnected so they can appeal before being shut down. Subject to change, of course.
My first reaction to this article was, "Dude. That sucks."
But then I gave it a little more thought: "Only 71?" I can't be certain about CMU, but at my university (which shall remain nameless, like myself ;) such a crackdown would probably result in three-quarters of the student body losing network priviliges. That may be a slight exaggeration, but in my estimation well more than half of the students here have countless gigabytes of MP3s and pirated (ugh. hate that word.) software shared, unpassworded, via Windows file sharing. (And probably a sizable number using Samba.) If this weren't enough, finding the offenders would be significantly easier with the half-dozen student-run network searches. As tech-savvy as my univ claims to be and is from my observation, this many students (a few thousand, if all offenders got cut off) would probably start a riot, something the administration probably wants to avoid. This might sound like an "everybody else is doing it" argument, but I have a feeling network services will continue to overlook the "problem".
more randomness... last year I set up a ShoutCast server on my box playing for the most part music obtained illegally off the network and generally abusing the bandwidth graciously provided by the college. :) I had it running for a few months, noticed it was always full, so I doubled the number of users allowed. Towards the end of last semester it was frequently on the top 10 at shoutcast.com and I realized this was probably a Very Bad Thing and took it down before They(tm) got interested. ;)
So, my thoughts on the whole thing if anyone cares: the RIAA sucks and CMU's actions were unjustified. Copyright violation is illegal (but *not* theft), and if the RIAA really needed the money, I'd probably go out and buy several of the albums I have on my hard drive (probably not just for one song, blah blah). Whatever, believe what you will on this topic, I just hope I'm right in thinking "It can't happen here." ;)
I'm guessing that these were pirate MP3 sites. Why? because it makes sense, if they were really for personal use then I'm almost positive that the school wouldn't have done anything. At least they wouldn't have few years back. From personal experience and that of friends, the school and the CMU police go way out of their way to protect CMU students. I know guys who went out drinking, under age, got hammered, called the CMU police and got a free ride home, no questions asked. I know a guy who got busted by non-CMU police for a federal crime (bomb threat, i just knew the guy, we weren't friends) and then CMU pulled strings and instead of spending the night in jail they got him transfered into the custody of CMU police and he slept in his bed that night (they didn't even press charges!) it never even made the police blotter in the newspaper. Even people who got in trouble for breaking CMU's rules generally don't get punished very harshly, maybe some community service that they don't even make you complete or you'll go before the student judicial board. And you have full due process, you can appeal decisions.
What's most likely is that these kids got flat out busted, pirating MP3s (regardless of what you think of copyright law or RIAA, it's still against the law) and the school steps in and decides to "punish" them instead of throwing them to the RIAA wolves. Getting your plug pulled in October or November for the rest of the semester isn't that bad. Heaven forbid one of them has to use a cluster for an assignment. It sure as hell beats a pricey law suit. Or you can take a 90 minute copyright class? Probably taught by a TA who is going to let them go after 15 minutes. You guys are supposed to be pissed that these guys got off scott free because of CMU where others have been acutally punished for breaking the law.
The fact that RIAA knew at all is something, I wonder how they learned of it. Innocent kids ripping their own CDs and putting them on shares so they can listen to the MP3s in the clusters, right? They are going to threaten moneyless students? Yeah right. Honestly, these kids are probably lucky that this so called punishment is all they got. I'm not saying that like they should be punished more harshly but it's a very real possiblity. Someone has responded raising the point that high-bandwidth internet connections aren't a right but a privilege, the same thing can be said about music if you can't afford it then that's tough. If you want me to sign your petition I'll be glad to but building your collection of illegal MP3s isn't exactly what I'd call civil disobedience.
this isn't just looking at college web sites or local shares, anything and EVERYTHING will be open to audit here.
and all this simply because there was some abnormal traffic loads on the network between 7pm and 5am. (which, personally, isn't abnormal hours for me. it's when i do my best work!)
but it's kinda sick now that i'm going to wind up having to take extra precautions on all my work. i've even turned over the idea of setting up a dam tunnel to a friend with a cable modem. that way the college won't see crap of what i'm doing.
before long, it's going to turn into a situation where the colleges go door to door inspecting every student's machine or getting all the machins running SMS or similar to keep tabs on what students use their computers for.
since when the hell did the students become the enemy?
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"There is no off position on the genius switch." --Dave Letterman
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If borrowing MP3s is legal, but copying is not, than am I borrowing other forms of content ( like when I view web pages ), or copying? Is the distinction made by the content provider? The music CDs I purchase didn't mention any of this in their license agreement... It seems to me that the burden of proof would be to establish that the music was being listened to simultaneously by the person who owned the original and the person downloading. It isn't illegal to make it possible to break the law ( at least in this way ).
If I had a suspicion that some of my physical property... say a couple clock radios which had been stolen, might be in the posession of a few students on campus though I didn't know who, or even if that was the case. Would the adminstrators at my request send people around searching the dorm rooms for alarm clocks with my name on them?
I don't think I would get that kind of cooperation from them. Why does the RIAA get that kind of help?
Copyright violations are not nearly as serious, yet the RIAA seems to be able to recruit anxious Gestapo voulunteers for THEIR cause. What is it that makes people treat their property with so much respect compared to if it were mine?
Are you referring to CMU?
Packet sniffing is fine here as long as you don't put your ethernet card into promiscuous mode. Anything with a broadcast or your mac address is fair game.
Hubs and switches are also allowed. While the network guidelines say no managed hubs or switches, there's no real reason behind that, and it would probably be simple to register such a device as another computer.
"...at the order of the Recording Industry Association of America"
The RIAA is a private commercial organization. They cannot order anything without a legal authority making the order (FBI, police, etc.)
The RIAA wants you to believe it has legal authority, but it has none. The AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) has about as much authority to "order" a college to sweep college computers for illegally distributed music files.
--Philip
"It's amazing how our industry is strewn with beautiful, dead technology and bitter engineers." --M. Huyck
What about all the people that run Napster? No one ever complains about them, or anyone else that runs some sort of non-standard distribution method. (http://www.napster.com/ has a client that gives you access to hundreds of gigs of mp3s, http://www.hotlinesw.com/ has a client that is primarly used for pirated software, mp3s, and porn, etc.) If you don't want to get in trouble, just don't use things like Windows SMB filesharing. It's crazy.
I wish more musical artist would claim ownership of their music and tell the recording companies to shove their bullshit contracts up their ass. Folks, MP3 and the internet is the way to go. Let the recording industry die. The sooner the better.
Keep those MP3's flowing people!!!!!!!!
I want CMU to have a set of rules that *they* have to follow, for acceptable use of the network. The students have one to follow. CMU needs one as well.
I would love to be able to talk to the people I know in England any time I feel like it, but I can't afford to. Since there's no way I would actually pay for all that phone time, it's OK for me to just steal it, right?
No. That costs the phone company money. I'd say that even if you don't agree with the guy, there is a difference between his situation and his example.
Word to the wise. Corporate lawyers and lobbyists have gotten hip to the importance of Slashdot and are posting all sorts of pro-crackdown, pro-RIAA, pro-Microsoft, anti-GPL BS lately. Notice the tone of most discussions now - there has been a none-too-subtle pro-corporate shift over the last 12 weeks.
Now back to more RIAA boosting, followed by more Microsoft defense, followed by more Stallman-bashing, followed by...
Night
Right! And this is precisely why we used to laugh at people leaving trsidoom2.zip, 18 meg, in their 5-meg-soft-quota world-readable accounts.
If anyone leaves copyrighted stuff out in the open they're going to get in trouble. It's as smart as tailgating a cop. To most people it's obvious... But once the sysadmin, or worse, the sysadmin's boss knows, they have to take some action, or as others have pointed out, be liable as well. What the MP3 owners got seems like a mild slap on the wrist, could it have been just a stunt to make RIAA happy?.
Some bands (and musicians) aren't touring type bands. They work in the studio. And how many bands have you seen that play as well live as they do in the studio? If the recording studio is out of date, so is the software industry. By my last check, I can record 24-bit digital music. Can your cd player play that? Can mp3 encode it? Granted, the gear isn't nearly the price it used to be, so it has naturally changed. Selling music is a business. Giving it away is, something else..
so the consumer doesn't get screwed. if i knew an album was solid the whole way through, i'd buy it, even though most of the money goes to the record company and not the artist. however, you have to admit it's true that most albums today suck, with one or two good songs. now, isn't it fair for the consumer to not have to suffer through the rest?
i bet you if i put $20 on the ground, you would pocket it. ha! caught you, you hypocrite! do you speed? have you ever lied to your mother? have you ever masturbated before? bet you'd say no to all of those too. i am a former musician who has had stuff published. the record companies screw us, really badly. when i found out about this internet thing (and linux) and mp3s, i had a really warm feeling inside. mp3s are one of the best ways for an unknown artist to get recognition for their work, and not have 99% of their money go to big business. stealing is NOT stealing. if i saw someone steal a loaf of bread from a hungry old lady, i'd punch him in the nose, but if a hungry old lady stole a loaf of bread from a walmart like store, i'd look the other way.
I was wondering... any CMU student know of the emails of some of the *administrators* that caused this to happen? I'd like to give them a piece of my mind!!
Since industry is increasingly reliant on the use of copyright and intellectual property as tools of the suppression of digital freedom, perhaps it is time to create something akin to www.onlyfreemedia.org (not a real URL yet). This would be a site that allows people to upload images, sounds, MP3 files and whatever else they create digitally and would like to grant the world free, unlimited, copy-lefted rights to forever more. This could include (their private) celebrity snapshots, art, music, photos, anything.
My one question is - can someone surrender their innate copyright voluntarily - can I say "yes, i created this but I will sign away my copyright for the good of my fellow citizens"?
> No... If you read a little further you would have noticed this line under the 'System Administration' section: "On rare occasions, computing staff may access others' files, but only when strictly necessary for the maintenance of a system or in active pursuit of serious security or abuse incidents."
Nobody has mentioned this but there's actually two copies of the Code of Ethics. The one on the official policy server doesn't have this pursuit of security clause.
Nobody's sure why there's a discrepency.
I agree that CMU could nuke connections for any reason, but just because they could kill connections, dosen't mean they had to. CMU could have also chosen a less heavy handed approach, such as warning the students first, or nuking connections for a short period of time. They had a lot of choices.
The fact of the matter is that the CMU administration, when setting policies, consistantly chooses to give little or no wieght to the student perspective. The students were invloved in illegal activity, and the school had a right to pull connectivity, but if I was paying through the nose for dorm housing (500/mo to live in 1 room with 1-3 other people, sharing a bathroom with 2-20 other people and sharing a kitchenette w/ 100+ people is pretty bad for the area) (oh, and freshmen can't opt out of dorm housing) Where was I? Oh, so if i were paying through the nose for housing, and depended on computer access to do my homework (for a CS the hours on line can *really* add up), and the public computer clusters were totally maxed out during "crunch-times", and I didn't have the option of using a private ISP, and lost connectivity for a month for maintaining a public Dilbert archive, well I might be a little bitter.
(although they did wait till after mid-terms before pulling the plug)
As an alum, the attitude of the administration really resonnates with me. It's a shame since there are some really great faculty and labs there.
- bridgette
There was at least one person who was disconnected for sharing completely legal to distribute MP3s. He did nothing wrong but was punished anyway.
There was at least one person who was disconnected for sharing completely legal to distribute MP3s. He did nothing wrong but was punished anyway.
What, did they want to 'nuke' you, too?
Send all you scathing remarks to Paul Fowler, the CMU drone quoted in the article.
A few thousant emails should give him something to think about.
fowler@andrew.cmu.edu
wow, this sounds a whole lot like something that happened here on the RPI campus last year... CIS, or ITS, or whatever they were calling themselves, decided to run a sniffer script to look through shared 'puters and their directories to find 'illicit' material. ostensibly this stemmed from a kiddie porn scare on-campus a year or so before, but what really was happening was that anything that looked bad to them was being catalogued for future use, including porn, mp3s, project proposals, transfer applications, plots to blow up the computing center, you name it. this was only discovered when a couple of students running linux machines realized that they were getting sniffed, took their server logs and posted them to our local usenet groups. the campus newspaper ran a story on it that week, and there was some major backpedaling.
arthur galpin's not dead. he's just on vay-K. promise. --ghep http://www.inflatablewhale.com/
I only see one problem with this...that the searches were done *without permission* on *private machines*, not University-owned machines with student or other private accounts.
Machines paid for by the students.
This is illegal search and seizure, which is tantamount to common carrier status. Now CMU leaves themselves open to a lawsuit if someone posts a web site with anything libelous, since others may be more willing to sue.
Plus, what about the fact that some of the MP3s might have been legally distributable? What if (hypothetically) I was in a band with a few buddies, and I had MP3s of our music on my (hypothetical) computer at CMU? Would they have yanked my access?
I see a big problem with this. While many of the MP3s that were being shared were probably illegally distributed, they were on private computers. This is like me advertising copied CDs over the phone, and the RIAA threatening to sue the phone company, then the phone company in turn yanking my phone service from me. That's because (as we all know) the phone company is a common carrier. They could, of course, alert law enforcement and have me investigated, but they can't sue the phone company.
Of course, copying of MP3s is illegal, as is copying CDs, tapes, DVDs, VHS tapes, etc. It doesn't matter if the CDs, tapes, DVDs, VHS tapes, or MP3s are legally distributable. So is the consumer having a high-quality medium (whether it be audio or video) to produce and distribute their own content.
disclaimer.h: The opinions presented in this Slashdot post ('Post') are not those of my employer, ABC19 WKPT ('WKPT') but rather those of me ('me'). Any flames in response to the Post will be ignored by me.
_______
Scott Jones
Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
Game Show Fan / C64 Coder
FC Closer
I would bet that CMU students were in fact smarter that the general media and they would never use unsafe protocols to distribute (even privately) copyrighted material. (hey, that's Andrew's FS home!) Dumb students...not from the CS department...make them pay, it's the law... But this put in evidence that privacy is a real subject in today's networked life...
As an undergrad at CMU, I would like to offer my own opinion on this.
First of all, the MP3 situation on the campus network is/was BAD. Opening up the little Network Neighborhood gave hundreds of computers sharing terabytes of MP3s. Concealment is/was laughable at best. No, worse than that -- it was essentially a joke. It is/was extremely commonplace to find all sorts of people (not just tech kids; Microsoft makes it easy!) who would open/play MP3's over the network. As you can guess, this is a terrible bandwidth hog (most dorms are at unswitched 10mb).
When I'd meet my friends during the summer and they'd talk about how their school had banned MP3s completely from the network, etc. etc., I'd think, "Wow, that's funny, CMU hardly cares unless you're totally obvious about it or waste obscene amounts of bandwidth." Their recent "crackdown" didn't surprise me at all; the only thing that surprised me is how long it took for it to happen.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm all for privacy. I'm a member of the ACLU. I don't even believe in intellectual property. But practically, this was a completely reasonable response to a completely ridiculous situation.
- Tom 7
>I have met the head of computing services, he is
>a really cool guy, and he did not want to do
>this.
John Lerchey (if that's who you're talking about) is NOT a cool guy. I almost lost network access freshman after a company (MetaCreations) threatened to sue me and CMU for making an open source *clone* of one of their programs. Lerchey was 100% "let's have no trouble here -- just take down the software and forget this ever happened" about it.
- Tom 7
Hey, someone actually read the links and posted a civil and interesting discussion! Thank-you! (Will miracles never cease on /. ?! ;-)
:-)
Apparently that other guy never read the part in my orginal message:
"I have never got a ticket for driving without a license"
If I was breaking the law, i.e. driving without a license, then why didn't the law officer do anything? Oh wait, that guy flamed and never even bothered to read the links I posted.
You're absolutely right: There is NO law which states you MUST have a US drivers license to drive a car in the US.
Doesn't everyone know that "you must register your vehicle with the Department of Motor Vehicles" ?
Oh wait, there is also NO law which states you MUST submit a car's MSO to the government/state?
Its not about breaking the law, its verifying what the law REALLY says.
i.e. why does the Declaration of Independence spell united States of America (uSA) with a small 'u' ane make the distinction from United States?
For all those considering of getting an IDP, remember that an International Drivers Permit is NOT valid in the place of issue, so don't go to AAA and get one.
Cheers
RIAA sued the Girl Scouts for singing songs around the campfire without paying royalties.
You mean you are still after this pirating, sharing mp3 thing?
i'm sorry but why can't you understand that sharing illegal things on campus is a dumb idea at the first place?
Any huge and continuous activity on your line will get attention, no matter what OS.
system admin: lerchey@cyrus.andrew.cmu.edu
Well maybe a call to England is a bad example because there like would be tariffs between multiple carriers, but in cases where it is a single carrier, say local long distance (don't you just love that term) from an RBOC, the marginal cost of "my" phone call is essentially nothing, assuming they're not a maximum capacity where a stolen phone call is preventing a paying customer from making one. So in that case it really doesn't cost the company anything, but it's still stealing to use the time without paying.
I can't claim it's a "perfect" analogy, since pretty much by definition there is no such thing.
First of all, if you listen only to net "radio" stations that have a right and license to broadcast all of the music they use, then great, no problem. However, if your are listening to streaming broadcasts of illegally distributed MP3 files, then you are just as guilty as the person broadcasting (at least for a moral, if not legal perspective).
As far as I know all of the mp3s I listen to are legal as either I own them or the person who is streaming them owns them. Last time I checked letting someone else listen to your music for free wasn't illegal, and if it is I'd better throw away my speakers and get some headphones because my girlfriend has been illegaly listening to my music for months now....
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Guessing passwords to enter a password protected
area is not illegally breaking into a computer system and stealing private data? Tell that to Randal Schwartz, "just another Perl hacker and convicted felon".
Rahul.net on Randal, Friends of Randal Schwartz, Randal's Homepage, Tim O'Reilly on the prosecution of Randal.
I'd say, sue CMU and see what comes from it.
© Copyright 1999 Kristian Köhntopp
I am concerned about the whining about piracy by a lot of people here.. it should be very obvious that mp3s _only_ hurt major labels with mainstream sh*t that gets thrown away after a week so it's simply not worth buying.
Good releases do still get bought no matter if someone possesses rips of them or not. The only lost "customers" are poor kids that could not afford buying them anyway. A great album being a profound work of art would be a bargain even if the price was doubled if you think about what you are getting back - something you will enjoy for years, possibly for decades.
I am actively involved in release and distribution of mp3s (no, not legal ones), but we only cover albums of a certain underground (but still commercially significant, at times) music style, hence we do not really appear on the radar screen of the RIAA and similar pestilences.
What we are doing does in fact support sales of our kind of music, because it gets absolutely no airplay and you have to sacrifice a lot of time and stay in touch with the 'scene' to keep yourself updated about new releases. MP3s make it possible to be informed without doing all that. And no, an excerpt is not enough.. maybe it is for a pop album, but not for anything beyond that because "real" artists not driven by commercial greed are uncalculable and could put 1 track you like and 9 tracks you dislike on an album.
It MUST be the whole thing, and one must be given enough time to listen to it before a decision can really be made. We support this decision, and frankly said, I don't give a damn about if this is illegal or not - it is simply the right thing.
Of course, hardly any of this applies to charts stuff. They do lose sales on those, but they deserve it because its simply inferior work and a big ripoff.
cheers.
As I understand it, from a legal point of view it is a grey area. The case law for a company examining its employees email upheld it was the company's right, while for an ISP reading customers email (without a court order) it was judged illegal. Whether a student paying a university establishes them as an ISP or whether a student is considered an employee is a subject which to my knowledge, has not been legally settled.
Hmm, scary. "Big Brother" is out there, and it's a commercial entity. Lovely.
Where did you hear this? Firstly, this has nothing to do with illegal distribution of MP3's. Even if you *were* legally entitled to a 24-hour "evaluation" period, that CERTAINLY would never give you the right to duplicate or re-distribute duplicated copies.
Additional ramifications of this assumption include (but are not limited to):
Video rentals. Why rent when you can buy, watch it, and return it within 24 hours FOR FREE?
Magazine sales. Buy a mag, read it, return it the next day. Consider that $2.99 a refundable deposit!
Fast reader? Why rent from the library when you can get a 24-hour rental from the book store?
Fair use has NOTHING to do with "evaluation" of a copywritten work. Fair use is meant to allow people limited reproduction rights for certain research and educational purposes and to grant certain exemptions for libraries.
An excellent web site that explains copyright and "fair use": http://fairuse.stanford.edu/