You're missing the point.. The University of Akron is public institution which is partiality supported by state and federal tax dollars. On-campus residents have no choice but to use them as their ISP/OSP. Rules governing public institutions should reflect those that govern public libraries which clearly state that upon request filtering has to be removed/disabled. While I have made several requests to this effect, they have refused to take action and have continued to violate mine as well as many other student's rights. The University has a network usage policy, however this policy is not part of their housing contract and therefore should not pertain to on-campus residents.
While not directly affected by Comcast's filtering policy, I for one hope this guy wins and sets a legal precedent on which other lawsuits against ISPs/OSPs can be based. As a student currently attending The University of Akron who resides on campus, I look forward to the day when EFF or ACLU pursues action against The University of Akron for violating student's rights in the same manner that Comcast has violated the rights of their customers. Shown here are some logs highlighted to show some of the filtering that is being done to students residing on campus. Not only is The University of Akron filtering Bittorrent traffic but also HTTPS, SSH, VPN, IMAP, NTP, and as well as many others that I may have missed. This filtering is not only intrusive to students that require secure access to remote resources, but is also counter productive to new innovation. I am appalled by the actions this, and many other, public institutions have taken towards the treatment of students and their rights online.
For reference, the 130.101.239.250 address shown in the logs is that of my server. It is on 24 hours a day so feel free port scan it if you like. I suspect you won't be able to determine which ports are open due to all inbound traffic being blocked by the University as well.
you are innocent until proven guilty. In order to convict someone of unauthorized distribution of copyrighted content, the RIAA must prove that a distribution of their copyright owners' intellectual property(IP) did in fact occur. To this day, the RIAA has failed to charge anyone, who has made their copyright owners' IP available for download, with unauthorized distribution of copyrighted content due to the mere lack of evidence. To further complicate the matter, the RIAA has been known to download a copy of the IP for inspection from the individual that has made it available. This however does NOT constitute unauthorized distribution since the RIAA has been granted permission by the copyright owners they represent to obtain their IP in this manner. In this situation, since the distribution of the content was authorized by the copyright holders, the individual from which they have downloaded the IP from has not yet committed a crime. In order to show that an individual has committed unauthorized distribution of copyrighted content, the RIAA would have to catch the individual in the act of transferring the copyrighted content to another individual who has not been authorized, by fair use or otherwise, to obtain a copy of the IP.
The DMCA, on the other hand, explicitly states that in the event an individual has made copyrighted content available without authorization from the copyright owner, the copyright owner is to contact the individual's ISP and request that the content be made unavailable or removed. In the event that the ISP does not comply, then and only then may the copyright owner pursue other measures to have the content forcibly removed. The RIAA has failed, in almost every known case, to follow the procedures detailed by the DMCA for handling possible copyright infringement cases. They are therefore violating US federal law by suing John Doe for copyright infringement before requesting that John Doe's ISP remove the copyrighted content.
The truth behind why organizations like the RIAA have been target individuals who have made their copyright owners' IP available is not to charge them with unauthorized distribution of the content, but to charge them for unauthorized possession of their copyright owners' IP. In other words those who are providing the content are also more likely to have obtained the content illegally. However, the assumption that by making the copyrighted content available without authorization is guilty of unauthorized distribution is completely unfounded.
While IANAL, this is my understanding of copyright law.
Vendors have been promising us high density compact discs for years, and we have yet to see them make a dent into the market. HVD for instance, which was developed by Optware and announced back in 2004, promised storages sizes up to 3.9TB or more per disc by 2010. So far the only company to produce a product based on the HVD technology has been InPhase Technologies. Their Tapestry unit costs a mere $18,000 USD for the drive and another $180 USD for the media. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are no exception to this either. If any of these formats are to compete with current storage trends, they will need to become cheap and affordable compared to other forms of storage.
The University of Washington has given their students a great advantage here. In previous cases, requests for immediate discovery by the RIAA have been granted due to ex parte of John/Jane Doe. It is at this point the RIAA's evidence against a person is the weakest. That is to say, they only have evidence that you have made intellectual property available, but none that indicates that you yourself have actually committed copyright infringement. If the request is granted, the RIAA will then subpoena your school to hand over information that identifies the actual name of the John/Jane Doe. From the information provided, it appears that these students have approximately 20 days until the RIAA will subpoena that information. However, the question of whether the RIAA has already been granted immediate discovery still remains. If the motion has not been granted before receipt of the letter, you may still have a chance to appear in court as John/Jane Doe to contest their request for discovery based on their relatively weak evidence. In response to such letters, I would indicate that all future correspondence with you be channeled through a college coordinator via a unique anonymous identifier such as John Doe #12345. By doing so you have established a means of communication by which the RIAA must use to notify you of any legal action they wish to pursue against you. In turn, this will guarantee that you have the opportunity to contest their motion for immediate discovery in court. At this stage it is important to remember that the burden of proof is on them. Therefore should you follow this route, you should not reveal any additional information to them other than what they already have. This includes your name and your identity.
Its a trap. Don't fall for it. The RIAA has no legal recourse since they don't actually own the rights to the intellectual property. By deciding to comply and pay the RIAA, you do NOT receive protection from being sued by the actual intellectual property owner. Ergo, if you pay, the RIAA will turnover any relevant information to the appropriate owners who may then file suit against you. This is all a ploy to get you to confess that you've done something wrong and provide them with the information they need to ensure that you lose any subsequent cases.
While I agree with the parent, I'm a bit questionable about the numbers that were quoted. I'm willing to bet the majority of the people who downloaded Safari, downloaded it twice. Once when it was initially released and again for the recently patched release.
With all the talk about this recently, I'm surprised someone hasn't mentioned this sooner...
Granted I'm not a lawyer, but last I read, copyright law explicitly states that it is perfectly legal for students attending an educational institution to make a copy of any copyrighted work for educational purposes. Who's to say the students in question weren't doing so for this exact purpose?
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but ATI has long since had issues of creating stable and viable drivers for its products. I'm sure you all remember the ATI Rage Fury Maxx which debuted some six or seven years ago. It not only came with two onboard video processing units, but also promised to be the fastest video card on the market for its time in its price range, $150 USD. So what happened to this card, you say? As it turns out ATI was only capable of providing drivers that were compatible with Windows 98 in an age when Windows 2000 was just becoming popular. Initially ATI posted that they were in the process of making Windows 2000 drivers for the card, only to retract the statement a year later with a note saying that Windows 2000 didn't support multiple video processing units on a single video card. If anything I doubt the problem was with Windows 2000.
Not having learned from my previous experience with ATI, I later purchased an ATI HDTV Wonder more than a year after its release. At which point I had long since upgraded my system to a dual 1800+ Athlon MP system running Windows XP SP2. Upon installing the card in my now year old system I once again faced issues with the quality of ATI's drivers. In fact the drivers that shipped with the card refused to install properly. The result was I then had to download all new drivers from ATI's website. However the frustration did not end there. After downloading the drivers it took nearly four hours to get the new and pristine drivers to install, much too long for any average user. Once installed the performance was sub optimal at best, even on my dual processor system which the market was only just beginning to catch up to in terms of speed.
Reluctantly the story doesn't end there. About the same time I bought the ATI HDTV Wonder, I also purchased a Compaq laptop that had, that's right you guessed it, an onboard ATI Radeon Mobility U1 video card and an AMD Athlon 2800+ processor. In its original configuration, running Windows XP SP2, the card worked great. I was content with the performance and the speed of the card given that it was in a laptop after all. However, having recently decided to switch to Linux on my laptop for security among other reasons, I immediately felt the issues associated with the onboard ATI chipset. While Linux supposedly provides full support of this card through DRI, I have yet to get 3D acceleration working properly on my laptop despite having invested a large amount of time tweaking the settings for the ati driver module in my xorg.conf file. Eventually I did what most others would do, I turned to ATI's most recent proprietary fglrx driver only to find that my card was not even listed as being supported in Linux by ATI. With a little bit of tweaking I was finally able to get my card to work with the ATI fglrx drivers by specifying a different ChipId. Unfortunately the ATI fglrx driver then reported that it couldn't communicate with the fglrx kernel driver, and therefore 3D acceleration was again disabled. Furthermore, I found ATI's drivers only to provide a slight improvement over those developed by the Linux community and thus hardly worth the effort.
After these three incidents, only one thing is certain, I will never buy another ATI product.
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You're missing the point.. The University of Akron is public institution which is partiality supported by state and federal tax dollars. On-campus residents have no choice but to use them as their ISP/OSP. Rules governing public institutions should reflect those that govern public libraries which clearly state that upon request filtering has to be removed/disabled. While I have made several requests to this effect, they have refused to take action and have continued to violate mine as well as many other student's rights. The University has a network usage policy, however this policy is not part of their housing contract and therefore should not pertain to on-campus residents.
While not directly affected by Comcast's filtering policy, I for one hope this guy wins and sets a legal precedent on which other lawsuits against ISPs/OSPs can be based. As a student currently attending The University of Akron who resides on campus, I look forward to the day when EFF or ACLU pursues action against The University of Akron for violating student's rights in the same manner that Comcast has violated the rights of their customers. Shown here are some logs highlighted to show some of the filtering that is being done to students residing on campus. Not only is The University of Akron filtering Bittorrent traffic but also HTTPS, SSH, VPN, IMAP, NTP, and as well as many others that I may have missed. This filtering is not only intrusive to students that require secure access to remote resources, but is also counter productive to new innovation. I am appalled by the actions this, and many other, public institutions have taken towards the treatment of students and their rights online. For reference, the 130.101.239.250 address shown in the logs is that of my server. It is on 24 hours a day so feel free port scan it if you like. I suspect you won't be able to determine which ports are open due to all inbound traffic being blocked by the University as well.
you are innocent until proven guilty. In order to convict someone of unauthorized distribution of copyrighted content, the RIAA must prove that a distribution of their copyright owners' intellectual property(IP) did in fact occur. To this day, the RIAA has failed to charge anyone, who has made their copyright owners' IP available for download, with unauthorized distribution of copyrighted content due to the mere lack of evidence. To further complicate the matter, the RIAA has been known to download a copy of the IP for inspection from the individual that has made it available. This however does NOT constitute unauthorized distribution since the RIAA has been granted permission by the copyright owners they represent to obtain their IP in this manner. In this situation, since the distribution of the content was authorized by the copyright holders, the individual from which they have downloaded the IP from has not yet committed a crime. In order to show that an individual has committed unauthorized distribution of copyrighted content, the RIAA would have to catch the individual in the act of transferring the copyrighted content to another individual who has not been authorized, by fair use or otherwise, to obtain a copy of the IP. The DMCA, on the other hand, explicitly states that in the event an individual has made copyrighted content available without authorization from the copyright owner, the copyright owner is to contact the individual's ISP and request that the content be made unavailable or removed. In the event that the ISP does not comply, then and only then may the copyright owner pursue other measures to have the content forcibly removed. The RIAA has failed, in almost every known case, to follow the procedures detailed by the DMCA for handling possible copyright infringement cases. They are therefore violating US federal law by suing John Doe for copyright infringement before requesting that John Doe's ISP remove the copyrighted content. The truth behind why organizations like the RIAA have been target individuals who have made their copyright owners' IP available is not to charge them with unauthorized distribution of the content, but to charge them for unauthorized possession of their copyright owners' IP. In other words those who are providing the content are also more likely to have obtained the content illegally. However, the assumption that by making the copyrighted content available without authorization is guilty of unauthorized distribution is completely unfounded. While IANAL, this is my understanding of copyright law.
Vendors have been promising us high density compact discs for years, and we have yet to see them make a dent into the market. HVD for instance, which was developed by Optware and announced back in 2004, promised storages sizes up to 3.9TB or more per disc by 2010. So far the only company to produce a product based on the HVD technology has been InPhase Technologies. Their Tapestry unit costs a mere $18,000 USD for the drive and another $180 USD for the media. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are no exception to this either. If any of these formats are to compete with current storage trends, they will need to become cheap and affordable compared to other forms of storage.
The University of Washington has given their students a great advantage here. In previous cases, requests for immediate discovery by the RIAA have been granted due to ex parte of John/Jane Doe. It is at this point the RIAA's evidence against a person is the weakest. That is to say, they only have evidence that you have made intellectual property available, but none that indicates that you yourself have actually committed copyright infringement. If the request is granted, the RIAA will then subpoena your school to hand over information that identifies the actual name of the John/Jane Doe. From the information provided, it appears that these students have approximately 20 days until the RIAA will subpoena that information. However, the question of whether the RIAA has already been granted immediate discovery still remains. If the motion has not been granted before receipt of the letter, you may still have a chance to appear in court as John/Jane Doe to contest their request for discovery based on their relatively weak evidence. In response to such letters, I would indicate that all future correspondence with you be channeled through a college coordinator via a unique anonymous identifier such as John Doe #12345. By doing so you have established a means of communication by which the RIAA must use to notify you of any legal action they wish to pursue against you. In turn, this will guarantee that you have the opportunity to contest their motion for immediate discovery in court. At this stage it is important to remember that the burden of proof is on them. Therefore should you follow this route, you should not reveal any additional information to them other than what they already have. This includes your name and your identity.
Its a trap. Don't fall for it. The RIAA has no legal recourse since they don't actually own the rights to the intellectual property. By deciding to comply and pay the RIAA, you do NOT receive protection from being sued by the actual intellectual property owner. Ergo, if you pay, the RIAA will turnover any relevant information to the appropriate owners who may then file suit against you. This is all a ploy to get you to confess that you've done something wrong and provide them with the information they need to ensure that you lose any subsequent cases.
While I agree with the parent, I'm a bit questionable about the numbers that were quoted. I'm willing to bet the majority of the people who downloaded Safari, downloaded it twice. Once when it was initially released and again for the recently patched release.
With all the talk about this recently, I'm surprised someone hasn't mentioned this sooner... Granted I'm not a lawyer, but last I read, copyright law explicitly states that it is perfectly legal for students attending an educational institution to make a copy of any copyrighted work for educational purposes. Who's to say the students in question weren't doing so for this exact purpose?
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but ATI has long since had issues of creating stable and viable drivers for its products. I'm sure you all remember the ATI Rage Fury Maxx which debuted some six or seven years ago. It not only came with two onboard video processing units, but also promised to be the fastest video card on the market for its time in its price range, $150 USD. So what happened to this card, you say? As it turns out ATI was only capable of providing drivers that were compatible with Windows 98 in an age when Windows 2000 was just becoming popular. Initially ATI posted that they were in the process of making Windows 2000 drivers for the card, only to retract the statement a year later with a note saying that Windows 2000 didn't support multiple video processing units on a single video card. If anything I doubt the problem was with Windows 2000.
Not having learned from my previous experience with ATI, I later purchased an ATI HDTV Wonder more than a year after its release. At which point I had long since upgraded my system to a dual 1800+ Athlon MP system running Windows XP SP2. Upon installing the card in my now year old system I once again faced issues with the quality of ATI's drivers. In fact the drivers that shipped with the card refused to install properly. The result was I then had to download all new drivers from ATI's website. However the frustration did not end there. After downloading the drivers it took nearly four hours to get the new and pristine drivers to install, much too long for any average user. Once installed the performance was sub optimal at best, even on my dual processor system which the market was only just beginning to catch up to in terms of speed.
Reluctantly the story doesn't end there. About the same time I bought the ATI HDTV Wonder, I also purchased a Compaq laptop that had, that's right you guessed it, an onboard ATI Radeon Mobility U1 video card and an AMD Athlon 2800+ processor. In its original configuration, running Windows XP SP2, the card worked great. I was content with the performance and the speed of the card given that it was in a laptop after all. However, having recently decided to switch to Linux on my laptop for security among other reasons, I immediately felt the issues associated with the onboard ATI chipset. While Linux supposedly provides full support of this card through DRI, I have yet to get 3D acceleration working properly on my laptop despite having invested a large amount of time tweaking the settings for the ati driver module in my xorg.conf file. Eventually I did what most others would do, I turned to ATI's most recent proprietary fglrx driver only to find that my card was not even listed as being supported in Linux by ATI. With a little bit of tweaking I was finally able to get my card to work with the ATI fglrx drivers by specifying a different ChipId. Unfortunately the ATI fglrx driver then reported that it couldn't communicate with the fglrx kernel driver, and therefore 3D acceleration was again disabled. Furthermore, I found ATI's drivers only to provide a slight improvement over those developed by the Linux community and thus hardly worth the effort.
After these three incidents, only one thing is certain, I will never buy another ATI product.