Congress Asks Universities To Enforce Copyrights 451
Wes Felter writes "In CNet, Declan McCullagh writes that members of Congress are concerned that universities are not enforcing the 1997 No Electronic Theft Act which made simple copyright violations into a federal crime. Should universities be responsible for tracking down illegal sharing on their networks? Will ISPs be next?"
leave them alone (Score:5, Insightful)
Just let them teach the classes. Let the students worry about the law.(or lack thereof)
Yes, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Responsibility? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is there always an assumption of guilt when dealing with file sharing?
This type of draconian heavy-handed measure is an insult. Why is the burben of proof on the individual and not the government?
A sense of proportion? (Score:5, Insightful)
Either someone is taking the mickey, or this politician really needs to get a sense of proportion.
University Responsibility for Adults (Score:5, Insightful)
Students are adults and responsible for their own behavior.
Copyright breach not an offence (Score:5, Insightful)
Is Congress asserting that universities are overlooking that or merely that copyright breaches are possible and not investigated?
Re:Responsibility? (Score:2, Insightful)
There is the possibility that peer-to-peer can prevent Slashdotting by using bandwidth in different places rather than all at a central server, but I find it hard to imagine that students using P2P are doing so out of the goodness of their hearts to cut their university's bandwidth bill.
Universities??!! (Score:5, Insightful)
If they think that ".edu" network admins (who are often students themselves) will enforce stupid RIAA rules, they are, in effect, asking the foxes to guard the henhouse!
Seriously, I remember, at my old university [no names given, for obvious reasons] that the admins used to have close to 50+GB of mp3s archive... =)
This being said, this has also been the case in the past 3 companies I work with... Maybe this is the solution to piracy: ask that kind of admins to take care of the piracy problem... then, turn around and pretend the problem has been solved! Case closed! =)
ISPs will be next, and be libel (Score:5, Insightful)
Its a dangerous thing to hold accountable 'carriers' of content that flows across them..
Whets next, the phone company? The US Postal service? FedEx? A gun store? Wal-Mart?
How about AMEX when someone uses a purchase for illegal activities...
Re:leave them alone (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Responsibility? (Score:2, Insightful)
Here is a size 9 spoon to remove ur cranial lobe from ur anal cavity.
Just to be safe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just to be safe, college administrations have to assume that all files are copyright by Hollywood and the RIAA. No original work should be done on college campuses. It's just too risky - when big business, backed by jackbooted government thugs, will question every file that every student has. Instead, colleges should buy all course materials straight from Hollywood and the RIAA, with (of course) Digital Rights Management software on every computer giving big business the right to monitor everything that goes on.
quick answer... (Score:5, Insightful)
As an edu admin myself, I have a repsonsibility for the content of my networks, which includes those nodes attached to them.
The same way that i am liable for illegal use of unlicensed software, not the premises. (Bizarre, and a pain, hence why I'm a tad zealous...)
Re:A sense of proportion? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Responsibility? (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably because when you search places like Kazaa, the chances of finding any software, images or music that isn't copyrighted is extremely low.
Of course, just because of this doesn't mean that there should be this assumption of guilt, however unfortunately more and more these days it's tending towards the "guilty unless you can prove yourself innocent" way of thinking.
Fight language FUD!! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a serious issue. We are not talking about a single misguided politician here. This is the result of an insidious, deliberate, and concerted effort by the *AA to abuse language in order to confuse people's sense of proportion and their sense of ethics. False analogies, shock-treatment and abuse of language are very effective propaganda tools, and that is what we are seeing here.
See what RMS has to say (from http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html) :
Fight this language FUD! Refuse to use FUD terms. Read the above mentioned article on gnu.org and point people to it. It can go a long way in putting things in true perspective and controlling the power of the *AA.
Total control won't be possible (Score:2, Insightful)
Ludicrous (Score:5, Insightful)
If this flies, then I think members of Congress should also be held personally responsible for any and all undesireable actions taken by any resident of the United States. Obviously they could be doing more to prevent criminal behaviour. Because they are not, because criminals still roam the streets, they should be held liable.
Can anyone point to a good place to read more about all the idiot ideas floating around in Congress? I'd like to get a better handle on who the real bozos are who float this kind of stupid shit.
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Recently there was a story about spammers using students as relays [slashdot.org]. If it was up to me, I'd say that the university administrators should spend time hunting the spammers.
The biggest problem, from the perspective of law, is that no one but very few people care about illegal filesharing. If I start sharing files illegally from my home computer, it's not like anyone would care (with the exception of a few companies the media giants fund). If I started sending spam, I'd be having hard time trying to keep my connection to the net because there are people who would immediately try to trace and report my actions. Illegal filesharing is not frowned upon like most other crimes are. That's a fundamental problem that all the anti-p2p measures have failed to address. If they are serious about fighting illegal filesharing, they need to get the support of netizens and so far "they" have done nothing but stomp on our rights and values.
The thing is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Breaking a law, is breaking a law. The responsibility of enforcing laws falls on law enforcement, like the police, FBI, you get the picture. Schools have a job to teach their students, keep them fed and safe. Not to be baby-sitters and watchdogs for the government.
The irony is that student tuition is income for the schools. They use it to pay teachers, get books, computer labs...and bandwidth as well.
A lot of schools already took voluntary mesurements to limit the p2p bandwidth hogging. This i can understand.
What exactly is the incentive for universities to become the copyright police? What are they getting out of this? As far as I can tell, there just getting bitched at by the RIAA and congress. Unless either one of them gives scools financial support to aid in napping copyright offenders, there isn't any incentive for them. What are they going to do? Take schools to court because there's songs floating around their networks?
Some things cease to amaze me. Other things however, never cease.
Re:leave them alone (Score:5, Insightful)
We very quickly nail people who are sucking down ridiculous amounts of bandwidth sharing files, simply because they are slowing down the network connection for everyone else. However, we specifically make a point not to police traffic based on its content. Respecting students' privacy it utmost in our philosophy.
Hopefully I won't be getting orders on high to start inspecting traffic for media sharing. It's something that I, as a sysadmin, would really hate to do. Law enforcement is the job of the police, not sys-admins.
-Z
Real Laws are being broken (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
However, having a policy against something is not at all related to actively monitoring it. If you rent an apartment from me and the lease says "no dragging a keg inside and trashing the place", surely you'll agree that it's not my job (nor should it be) to install video cameras in the living room just to be sure. The same thing is true here: they can tell you not to share copyrighted files, but that shouldn't imply a responsibility to go through your shared files and determine which are copyright violations.
Which is not to say it won't be their responsibility by the time the lawyers are done with them...
I can't believe my eyes (Score:1, Insightful)
Reading all this, I get the impression that most people don't mind being spied upon, if it doesn't burden the admins too much
Are you really that brain washed? What will be next? Reporting students that are using the net to gain access to ideas that are too liberal. Well, they are all potential terrorists, after all. I mean, people who would steal money from those poor music publishing companies, are obviously terrorists.
Moral outrage because law-breaking is bad? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why are they screaming about P2P? What about radar detectors? Radar detectors are there to help drivers break laws--they have no other purpose. Breaking the speed-limit laws makes a driver much more likely to kill someone.
Unfortunately, people killed by speeding drivers don't make campaign contributions. File-sharing hasn't caused any deaths that I know about...
Re:leave them alone (Score:-1, Insightful)
Re:Yes, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
However, you should feel free to use that in your defense when they haul you into court. I'm sure you'll get a link on Fark with a "dumbass" tag next to it.
Re:leave them alone (Score:5, Insightful)
What an amazingly weak argument! Is _everyone_ supposed to be an arm of the law. People receiving unemployment benefits, people on welfare, people who drive on the interstate roads, people with federally-backed home loans and bank accounts, and on and on, all should become the enforcers of copyright violations by others? Perhaps you should rethink your position.
How else do you find eachother / files? (Score:3, Insightful)
There is the possibility that peer-to-peer can prevent Slashdotting by using bandwidth in different places rather than all at a central server, but I find it hard to imagine that students using P2P are doing so out of the goodness of their hearts to cut their university's bandwidth bill.
Seriously, most P2P *transfers* are directly peer-to-peer, just look up the IP. If they used HTTP servers, how would I know of them? Portscan? And how would I find a file in an easy way? An HTTP site doesn't have to have any index (think directory trees) or search box, should I spider all directories and make my own search tool?
The entire clue-stick is that you're taking a bunch of *peers*, each hosting their own share, and it'll appear as one big "server" you can search. The only real issue is file integrity, unless you have a checksum you can trust to go by (as opposed to normally you'd trust the download location, like e.g. tucows), you don't know that you're getting a virus / trojan / spam / fake / corrupt / whatever version and not the real thing.
And judging by some internal network shares / P2P systems, you're just plain wrong. If they downloaded all of that off some central server, it would be literally killed. It'd have to server out gigabits *per second* to keep up with the total trading of a huge bunch of peers. But one thing I'll give you - it's not out of the goodness of their hearts.
Kjella
Re:leave them alone (Score:4, Insightful)
It could be said that a law that can only be enforced effectively through unjust means is inherently unjust itself, which I think is what you are saying. I don't think that this is the case: people do (and should) obey laws on an "honour system" basis, not just because there's a threat of punishment!
The justness of a law hangs on a lot more than enforcability.
Re:Responsibility? (Score:2, Insightful)
And, of course, whether that copyrighted software, images or music has been released by the copyright owners for trading has no bearing on whether it's legal or not to download it. Freeware, anyone?
Something to think about.. (Score:1, Insightful)
that stay put after being copied are viewed as
"stolen" in the same way that physical property
is stolen?
Re:Responsibility? (Score:3, Insightful)
My boss is a real KaZZaa fan so I jumped on a work machine that had it loaded, signed up and searched for some stuff to try. After finding some files that seemed amaturish by file names, I down loaded and looked at them, most were obivously illegal stuf and went to delete them and discoved that someone had already uploaded from the computer so I had become a NET act felon. there didn't seem to be anyway to tell if a file was copyrighted or not from the interface.
University Experience (Score:5, Insightful)
At the university that I worked for the tech to person ratio was around 1 to 120 computers. At the time the tech was required to also keep several different servers running. In a college of about 500-600 computers we had 5 techs full time. We were required to manage Novell, NT, Unix servers, handle web page creation for classes, and early on handle student accounts (later taken away due to a central control issue at the university).
Student web pages were particularly questioned -
It has gotten better there btw. In addition to the 5 techs they now have 2 people whose sole job is to take care of servers (and figure out how to distribute/manage licensed software, and email complaints, and viruses, and step in and do regular tech stuff, and fix the occasional home users computer, etc)
At the university level they throttled the bandwidth for those services down to a crawl - still workks just too slow to be usefull
If they aren't aggressively policing their networks its because they kind of have their plates full.
I highly suggest working for the tech department of any college/university even part time - they are almost always hiring and almost always need the help- great and diverse tech education!
Because a P2P network is more like a public street (Score:3, Insightful)
RIAA: "There's a bunch of cars speeding down highway 45, all other highways are ok."
Cops: "Okay, we've blocked highway 45 of traffic"
RIAA: "There's a bunch of cars speeding down highway 34, all other highways are ok."
Cops: "Okay, we've blocked highway 34 of traffic"
RIAA: "There's a bunch of cars speeding down highway 66, all other highways are ok."
Cops: "Okay, we've blocked highway 66 of traffic"
Legal car drivers: Why are all the highways blocked?
You can block a P2P place, shuffle the people around a bit. But as long as there are millions of people that want to trade P2P, they'll just move to some other net, unless you want to shut down the whole infrastructure (read: Internet).
Kjella
Re:leave them alone (Score:5, Insightful)
Where's the Jack Valenti drug czar appealing to congress to close down potential "drug dens" on campuses? Where's the Hilary Rosen rape and violent assault czar lobbying congress to force all students to cease and desist from such behavior or face ten, twenty, fifty years in prison? Where's the outrage about heroin use on college campuses?
All of which is to say: the laws are there, most folks are aware of the laws, universites make a good faith effort to enforce the laws. But I cannot in good conscience understand why filesharing -- filesharing! -- seems to be more important than preventing drug use, alcohol abuse, or violence on college campuses.
Actually, I do understand. The answer is money. Corporations have such sway in American government and have the money to back up their big mouths that they've managed to convince to big-business suits in congress that sharing an MP3 is more vital than preventing rape.
If those legal fucks spending money on filesharing initiatives would put *half* that money -- even a *tenth* of that money -- into rape and violence awareness programs on American college campuses then the quality of life would be immeasurably improved.
Re:leave them alone (Score:3, Insightful)
I voted lp across the board last year, and I'll do it again and again. This isn't about civil liberties. This is a simple case of "I don't want to buy it, so I'm going to steal it."
Yes, the RIAA's method of distrobution is outdated. No, I don't think that Congress should make it a Federal crime to steal, that should be up to the local lawmakers. No, I don't think that all filesharing is illegal nor should it be. Yes, I do think that I should be able to play music that I _have_ paid for wherever I like in whatever format I like. However, we are talking about publicly funded institutions which are allowing petty theft on an internet scale. That's like using a school bus to steal cds. I'm not going to go overboard like certain(overpaid) senators and say it's like murder. I'm not going to call it piracy. It's stealing.
Re:leave them alone (Score:3, Insightful)
The penalties are too high (Score:3, Insightful)
The "No Electronic Theft Act" sets the penalties way to high for committing a crime which is way too widespread. It's like here in New Jersey where tailgating carries with it a penalty of 5 points (the same as reckless driving), and as such cops are very hesitant to give out tickets for it. Lower the penalties to something reasonable, and you'll see Universities reporting the crime more often.
Re:leave them alone (Score:3, Insightful)
Aren't government mandates great.
Only question though is what happens when a University turns in (I would guess) at least 60% of its resident student body for felony crimes? Cringely wrote an article not too long ago that stated that law enforcement will be overwhelmed if they actually catch everyone.
The other thing is that the RIAA should really think about pushing this kind of tactic. Do they really want to do this to their customers? I would think that any college kids busted for sharing music would be highly unlikely to ever enter a Record Store ever again in their lifetime.
Re:Just to be safe... (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyone know of their School/ University doing things like this? Or is it just the status quo?
Re:Moral outrage because law-breaking is bad? (Score:3, Insightful)
Breaking the speed-limit laws makes a driver much more likely to kill someone.
Umm, care to back that up? When all the traffic is doing 70 and the speed limit is 55, you're more likely to kill someone by doing the speed limit then by breaking it.
Its not. (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not any worse, its not really a problem except that it affects serious money interests.
Love Stallman or hate him, but his rant on copyrights that he did a decade ago is so on the mark that its scary.
Copyrights as they exist today can't be enforced in a connected age unless the government places serious roadblocks to a free society.
A copyright or patent is a bargain between society and the creator. It is not an inherent right as many seem to think.
Where is the NRA? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:leave them alone (Score:4, Insightful)
They'll just raise tuition again to cover the costs. That's what they do around here. Tuition goes up damn near EVERY semester for some reason or another. The quality of the education sure isn't improving so it must be going to something important such as a program for reducing file sharing on the university network.
Re:leave them alone (Score:5, Insightful)
This *is* about civil liberties because it has a chilling effect among other things. The unauthorized duplication has been and continues to be used to prevent legitimate filesharing on otherwise neutral systems (i.e. Napster). This is like closing down all the roads in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas because some persons are using them to transport drugs from Mexico to the United States.
What I see alot of.... (Score:2, Insightful)
And then lets get into the bit about ownership. Just because I put a song up for sharing on P2P doesn't make it illegal. RIAA would like you to think that it does, but in fact it doesn't.
Case in point, I wanted to copy my old copy of Bush - Sixteen Stone to my Nomad to listen to en route to work yesterday. Guess what. MAJOR gash on the BACKside of the disc, two whole tracks are unuseable.
Now with the RIAA approved method of doing business they get $18 just for me regaining access to something I already own.
In the REAL world however, I just fired up Kazaa Lite and got my two tracks back for NOTHING, the way it should be.
Now even though those tracks were procured from a P2P service, there was absolutely nothing illegal about what I did.
You are confusing the term illegal.
Illegal would be me downloading Madonnas latest song from KL even though I would never be caught dead buying her CD (talk about illegal....why is she still pretending she can sing?).
But me downloading a copy of Bush - Glycerine when I already own the CD is NOT illegal.
The bottom line is this. Just because it's online and everyone has access to it doesn't make it illegal, me downloading it when I didn't purchase it IS. But since it would cut into their bottom line too much RIAA spins it to where most people believe hosting media online is automatically illegal.
Re:notforawhile (Score:3, Insightful)
If the accounts are honest and fair, then people are more likely to respect them. If they don't respect them, but merely fear enforcement, then they will violate them freely whenever they feel they won't be punished.
But fair accounts would reward people approximately equally for equal effort. This is not to the advantage of those who have modified the system to reward themselves excessively. So as opposed to enhancing the fairness, and hence the moral authority of the system, they choose to enhance the threat level of the system. (This is made the more likely as those who would be immoral enough to corrupt the system in the first place are less likely to attribute moral behavior to anyone else.)
There are other effects, but when you accuse the mass of society of immoral behavior, then either you have a silly definition, or the system is not seen as fair.
Re:leave them alone (Score:2, Insightful)
And copyright violation enforcement is the job of the copyright holder, not the police! These matters should be resolved in a civil court via lawsuit. My tax dollars should NOT go towards protecting individuals or corporations financial interests.
Illegally copying a copyrighted item is NOT the same as stealing, since the original item is still in the posession of the original owner. We haven't taken someone else's property away from them.
If I copy someone else's source code and use it in my product (or copy a play, a book, whatever, and pass it off as my work), then the copyright holder of that code sends me notification of my violation, and (hopefully) a dialogue ensues. If this isn't fruitful they proceed with legal action against me- getting a temporary cease-and-desist order, hauling me before a judge, getting a settlement. Note that it is up to the copyright owner to take action and provide their own lawyers.
But where we're talking about filesharing, or anything with the magic words "Internet", "computer" or "cyberspace" associated with it, we get shitty laws like DCMA and the No Electronic Theft Act. Now publicly funded prosecutors press the case, and pubicly funded prisons punish the wrongdoers (usually all out of proportion to the scope of the offence). This is wrong!
Re:leave them alone (Score:3, Insightful)
The framers knew that sooner or later the government would pass legislation that would be offensive to *the people* in some way because it flew in the face of the American concepts of freedom and individual rights.
If it isn't possible to search people's homes or sieze their papers and property than that entire class of "criminal behaviour" ( like having a meeting about overthrowing the government by force or some such) that took place in one's home and was inherently undetectable from without the home (thus giving your wife a black eye doesn't fall into the catagory) would be unenforcable.
That's the *point* of the bloody thing.
You are right, laws should be obeyed on the "honor system." That's also the bloody point. The entire idea that laws should just be calmly obeyed like sheep being led to the slaughter house is so entirely unamerican it's pathetic.
The American philosophy of law, the Constitution which it spawned, The Federalist Papers written in support of that Constitution and the next 100 years of American literary, legal and cultural history support the idea that Americans can and will simply ingnore unjust laws, and if necessary take up arms against them if they are not changed.
Laws are not the will of the people. Laws are the are the will of a few men on Capital Hill.
The people will have a voice, sooner or later. God help the men on Capital Hill if they don't listen soon enough.
And then God help us all.
KFG