Here at OSU we try very hard to maintain the "free communication of ideas", but that can only happen when the network is stable and available. What we found is that illegal music-sharing was using up 90%+ of our bandwidth, effectively preventing the free communication of ideas via other methods. So, we shape our traffic and impose bandwidth restrictions on the students living in dorms.
There has to be a balance.
Students and faculty need to let their IT departments know what they legitimate purposes they have for using P2P applications.
At Oregon State University, we ran into a huge problem with P2P sharing, in terms of bandwidth. One fall when the students came back, we were "in the straights" for several days - we were saturating our link to the commodotity Internet.
We discussed not allowing P2P on campus, but we learned from a few folks who were using it for legitimate research sharing purposes, and decided intead to use a packet-shaper and set a lower priority on P2P traffic. Additionally, our Housing group enforces pretty strict bandwidth limits (http://oregonstate.edu/resnet/policies.php). So far, this approach has been working great for us.
We do, of course, receive DMCA complaints on a regular basis (about 1-2/week for a University with 18,000 students - not bad, I think). When we get these complaints, we contact the person who owns the machine or webpage, find out if the file was really copywritten material, and make them take it down. Occassionally, we have gotten false reports from RIAA or MPAA, so we try not to assume that the files are being illegally shared.
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Here at OSU we try very hard to maintain the "free communication of ideas", but that can only happen when the network is stable and available. What we found is that illegal music-sharing was using up 90%+ of our bandwidth, effectively preventing the free communication of ideas via other methods. So, we shape our traffic and impose bandwidth restrictions on the students living in dorms. There has to be a balance.
Students and faculty need to let their IT departments know what they legitimate purposes they have for using P2P applications.
At Oregon State University, we ran into a huge problem with P2P sharing, in terms of bandwidth. One fall when the students came back, we were "in the straights" for several days - we were saturating our link to the commodotity Internet.
We discussed not allowing P2P on campus, but we learned from a few folks who were using it for legitimate research sharing purposes, and decided intead to use a packet-shaper and set a lower priority on P2P traffic. Additionally, our Housing group enforces pretty strict bandwidth limits (http://oregonstate.edu/resnet/policies.php). So far, this approach has been working great for us.
We do, of course, receive DMCA complaints on a regular basis (about 1-2/week for a University with 18,000 students - not bad, I think). When we get these complaints, we contact the person who owns the machine or webpage, find out if the file was really copywritten material, and make them take it down. Occassionally, we have gotten false reports from RIAA or MPAA, so we try not to assume that the files are being illegally shared.