Uni Students Slammed For Music Swapping 437
jomaree writes "The SMH Online reports that Sony, EMI and Universal will be in the Federal Court today, in an attempt to stop students using uni computers to swap music files. Michael Speck, the director of Music Industry Piracy Investigations, is quoted as follows: 'And we're not talking about one track here, one track there,' he said. 'We're talking piracy, significant examples of piracy.' By contrast, Sydney Uni says it knows of one student with a handful of files on a website, which does actually sound quite a bit like one track here, one track there."
Re:Uni? (Score:2, Informative)
Website is slow.. here is the full text (Score:5, Informative)
It's war on a generation of cyber piratesPrint this article [slashdot.org] | Close this window [slashdot.org]
ByAmanda Morgan
February 18 2003
The recording industry has launched its most aggressive offensive yet against illegal music swapping over the internet.
In the Federal Court in Sydney today, record companies will try to seize evidence of song swapping by students using the computer networks of the universities of Sydney, Melbourne and Tasmania.
Record labels in the United States and Europe have warned the world's top 1000 companies they must stop illegal music swapping on their networks or face legal action.
Australia's major record companies, Sony, EMI and Universal, are acting on suspicions that students, and possibly staff, are using the universities' computers to swap digital music files. The industry says the three universities have not divulged information, but that others have co-operated.
Michael Speck, the director of Music Industry Piracy Investigations, which tracks swapping on behalf of the Australian record industry, believes the illegal file trading is significant.
"And we're not talking about one track here, one track there," he said. "We're talking piracy, significant examples of piracy."
The University of Sydney says it knows of one student who established a website with a handful of songs for swapping on its system. It has "isolated the website, and will hand over the evidence at an appropriate time", a spokesman said.
There are hundreds of thousands of song files on personal computers worldwide. They are "swapped" for free using special software, robbing artists and their record companies of royalties.
But the president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, Cameron Murphy, said the industry was wrong to target students.
"The focus of these organisations should be on people who are running or pirating music for clear commercial benefit," he said. "I don't think there is any benefit to the community in prosecuting individuals who do this as a one-off. I mean, we'd have half the students in Australia in jail."
Mr Murphy also questioned whether the universities should be forced into the role of policing their students.
Mr Speck denied the industry was making an example of the universities. "Somebody gets caught being involved in a wrongdoing and they utter, 'We're not the only ones, why are we here?' Well, you got caught."
This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/17/10453305 39310.html
=252) refR=refR.substring(0,252)+"...";Note to the editors (Score:3, Informative)
Someone who's Australian (or world travelled) might know off the top of their head that SMH refers to they Sydney Morning Herald but it would be nice if the rest of us don't have to go clicking through links or searching the web just to find out what this TLA (three letter acronym) or that ETLA (extended three letter acronym) stand for.
On the other hand, that sounds too much like actual editing for a
Shooting flies with an elephant gun... (Score:5, Informative)
For anyone who hasn't read it yet, read Tim Oreilly's piece on OpenP2P.com [openp2p.com]. I won't parrot his thoughts here, but I will say I agree with them.
Oh, and pirate my music [mp3.com]
Re:This is just wrong (Score:3, Informative)
Monash University (Score:4, Informative)
Now, many of us have recently been advised by our superiors that we will "infringe copyright" even by doing such things as copying our own CDs or encoding them to mp3 files and bringing them into work. Also, our networks are being regularly scanned for machines running file-sharing applications.
It seems that they're gearing up to instituting a policy where having a machine that has transferred large amounts of data and has been seen listening on certain well-known port numbers will soon constitute grounds for having the contents of its hard drive searched.
Re:Blech, universities are completely inept... (Score:2, Informative)
They regretted this at the end of the year when the University IT tried to foist a AU$30k bill on us. (Bandwidth = Expensive over here)
End result was I got kicked out for some other minor misdemeanour.. but they were trying to get me to pay for it, until i asked them to take me to court
Re:Uni? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Good for them. (Score:5, Informative)
I speak from experience. In Oxford we had this great Gnutella clone called OxTella - ran on the 100Mbit/10Mbit LAN, so it was damn fast and good, and across all of Oxford. Then the RIAA sent a letter about some AIM file sharing to one of the colleges, some idiotic IT college officer sent out a mail to the entire college about it instead of keeping quiet and the next issue of the college newspaper had a big headline about it, and man, you never saw hundreds of nodes go down faster.
The universities are purveyors of education, not filesharing. They won't jeopardise the first to provide the latter.
Daniel
Re:Uni Students? (Score:2, Informative)
very entertaining, keeps you on your toes.
Federal Student Privacy Laws... (Score:5, Informative)
But we (I work in IT at a college) *do* have policies against using our equipment for breaking the law, and copyright infringement is specifically listed. And if we catch them, we'll nail them. All the RIAA needs to do is note the date/time and IP and we can trace that back to a specific student and disciplinary procedures WILL happen. Problem is, the RIAA doesn't get personal satisfaction. Just like when someone e-mails abuse@ and we reply "We are investigating and will take appropriate action. However, FERPA prevents us from sharing with you the results of our investigation and any disciplinary action." It pisses the complainer off and it's to no good end because we *do* act on these complaints and if a student is violating our terms, they get disciplined and sometimes expeled.
Surely people deleted it all anyway... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm a Usyd student and I've known about this was happening for a reasonable amount of time.
I did a "find ~ -name '*.mp3'" when I first heard about it and was disappointed that I only had three mp3 files. None of which were music, and all of which were legally obtained.
Since I felt like I'd be missing out I copied one of the directories in my web space and then renamed the files to be
Re:Absolutely! (Score:4, Informative)
piracy != theft
Theft=larceny
For that matter:
copyright infringement != piracy
"Piracy" is armed robbery on the high seas. How on earth this word got associated with the wholly non-violent act of copying a digital file is beyond me. At least it isn't called "music terrorism" or possession of "musical weapons of mass destruction" (yet).
Re:cooperation is mandatory (Score:3, Informative)
Disclaimer: I'm an American living in Sydney.
You're often guilty until proven innocent here. For instance, while riding a bus or train in sydney, you often have to prove that you are not riding illegally or face a minimum fine, or (as i learned the hard way) jailtime for giving them the "innocent until proven guilty" speech. If you can't prove you didn't steal, then Aussie law says you did, and lip service to the transportation authority personnel will get you locked up until you can prove that you were, in fact, riding legally.
Also, when you leave any store in australia with bags that you entered with, often you must surrender them for a hand search to prove that you did not steal anything. This is even AFTER you pass through the security tag detectors. Guilty until proven innocent reigns here.
a bit more on topic - if you have tens of thousands of songs that you've downloaded, I say that you shouldn't be too surprised that they're going to try to force you to stop. steal all you want, i think this in particular is a victimless crime, but don't get caught, and don't scream "information wants to be free!" when you get caught, you are breaking the law, after all.
And if you own the music you've copied to your hard drive, you better be ready to prove it at any time, since music companies do not believe in due process, and they're quite happy to hand you your own ass in a little plastic bag without a trial if they catch you.
Re:Monash University (Score:4, Informative)
We have no legal right to rip mp3s from our own legal CDs. We have no legal right to backup CDs for self-insurance. Check it out [copyright.org.au] (374KB PDF).
Hell - I'm probably infringing Copyright by quoting this paragraph from the Australian Copyright Council [copyright.org.au] PDF I linked to above:
Re:The article talks about shutting down (Score:1, Informative)
I understand that you're trying to use quotes from the article to support your view, but you -should- really finish that quote...it highlights the hypocrisy of the anti-IP crowd extremely well. Notice that even the guy who's leading the fight to support the right of people to violate copyrights is saying that it's -extremely- widespread. His quote that this suit will affect -half- the students in Australia definitely conflicts with the "sharing a few singles on a website" that some would prefer you to picture.
"The focus of these organisations should be on people who are running or pirating music for clear commercial benefit...I don't think there is any benefit to the community in prosecuting individuals who do this as a one-off. I mean, we'd have half the students in Australia in jail."