University of Utah Promises DMCA Crackdown 45
Milo Fungus writes "The University of Utah announced yesterday to all students, faculty, and staff that "the University will disable network access for any machine for which a DMCA complaint has been received" from the MPAA, RIAA, or member of the software industry. The full text of the memorandum can be found here. (Please be easy on the server and set up a mirror if you can.)"
Re:Must have (Score:1)
Text of Memo, just in case (Score:5, Informative)
From: Stephen Hess
Associate Academic Vice President for Information Technology
Stayner Landward
Dean of Students
Date: March 14, 2003
Subject: Illegal Sharing of Copyrighted Materials
The purpose of this memo is to officially notify all students, faculty,
and staff, that it is a violation of federal law and University policy
to share and/or distribute copyrighted materials without the permission
of the copyright holder. Violators may be subject to civil and criminal
prosecution under the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
(DMCA), as well as personal sanctions specified in University policy.
The University has received a significant increase in complaints from
representatives of the motion picture, music recording, and software
industries. The majority of the complaints are directly related to the
use of file-sharing software, such as KaZaA, Gnutella, and similar
programs.
File sharing software is most commonly used to download music and other
media. Many do not realize that this software may turn your personal
computer into a server, or upload site, even if that was not your
intent. Files on your network connected PC may then be illegally shared
with every other person connected to the World Wide Web. It is
imperative that the file sharing capability of these systems be
disabled. If you do not know how to disable this function, please
contact the Help Desk at 581-4000.
Industry representatives aggressively monitor the Internet to discover
incidents of illegal file sharing. When violations are discovered, they
contact the network owner and/or the Internet Service Provider and
demand that the offending device be disconnected from the network. To
protect the user and the University from further culpability under the
DMCA or University policy, the University will disable network access
for any machine for which a DMCA complaint has been received.
To restore network service, the user must contact the Help Desk and
arrange to sign a document stating that the user has disabled the file
sharing function of their software and has agreed to discontinue all
illegal file sharing activity. If the user is named in additional
complaints, they will be referred to the appropriate University
committee for further review and action.
Action taken by the University to remedy a violation does not preclude
the copyright holder from seeking civil and/or criminal prosecution.
The law specifies civil liability of not less than $200 or more than
$2,500 per act, and criminal penalties up to $500,000, and/or
imprisonment for up to 5 years for the first offense.
Thank you for taking this notification seriously.
$1 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:$1 (Score:5, Funny)
$2 if you make the victim the boss of the person responsible for the memo.
Re:$1 (Score:2, Funny)
Re:$1 (Score:2)
Thanks to the DMCA, the Patriot Act, the Ninth Circuit, the ACLU, the opponents of school vouchers, the flag burning bans, the Federal Hate Crime law and many, many others, the First Amendment has been slated to be repealed. It's become irrelevant.
Same for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th,
Political correctness, ho
Re:$1 (Score:1)
Re:$1 (Score:3, Insightful)
But when was the last significant invasion of American soil. 1812?
So there's only 9 out of the first 10 that you can't find blatant violations of. It's still an abysmal record and Congress, the Supreme Court and the last 10 Presidents or so should be ashamed of that record.
Re:$1 (Score:2)
Re:$1 (Score:3, Funny)
Re:$1 (Score:4, Funny)
common (Score:4, Informative)
But, then, all MAC addresses are tied to a netid nowadays to prevent this lag time...
no biggie (Score:2, Informative)
they turn off your network, you find your network not working, you call and find out what the deal is, they tell you, you fix the problem, you call and say so, they turn your netowrk back on.
heh (Score:2, Insightful)
a) ignore it.
b) not believe it.
In fact, the entire tone of the message has a kind of "you are not adults, you are children" type feel to it. By setting up a no-tolerance policy, the administration is sending the message that it does not trust its students.
If I
Re:Speaking of which... (Score:1, Informative)
I have two brothers and two sisters who are BYU students. My one brother might be one of the people in that picture, the other certainly isn't (he smiles too much...). I have an ex-roommate who went to U of U; he's a lawyer; figures.
BTW, the BYU computer accaptable use policy is here [byu.edu]; note that everything is framed in terms o
Let the games begin... (Score:3, Funny)
sendMail("We found a DMCA violation on this IP:",i);
}
It's such a bad thing to make policies where descions are arbitratily made before evidence is collected.
Re:Let the games begin... (Score:2)
and what is the opposite? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:and what is the opposite? (Score:1, Interesting)
ignoring history and other technologies (Score:3, Insightful)
You have a valid technical point, so do I. I actually have a lot of points.
Current alleged copyright affronts are analogous in a way to ridiculously mandated 55 mph speed limits, that after a few years of MILLIONS of people simply ignoring them, all of those people lawbreakers technically, our society and laws changed back to something a bit saner. I don't see any differences between sharing
Oooh! Easy nuking! (Score:2)
No need to use WinNuke anymore...
This is Sick (Score:5, Informative)
They'll shut down network access for a student automatically, at the first receipt of any DMCA complaint? No investigation, nothing? I'm sure groups like the Scientologists, whom /. has covered previously, will find this much to their liking. Some student has posted information on a school site that some group doesn't like? Send a DMCA complaint, and the school won't blink twice before taking that shit down.
I'm sure the school thinks there will be a great deal of volume of complaints, much too many for it to deal fairly with each case, so it's better to just err on the side of caution and presume students are guilty from the get-go. Well, there will be a large volume of complaints, now that the school has completely dropped trow and spread cheeks.
[RIAA guy]Hey, Valenti! And you, BSA whore! Point your complaint mills at the University of Utah! They don't even check 'em![/]
We've all heard about crap like complaints from the MPAA (under penalty of perjury!) about someone sharing sharing Harry Potter files, only to find they're actually Harry Potter book reports. Yes, I'm sure the amount of legitimate stuff is swamped by the illegal copyright infringement, but that's no excuse for an institution with as important a role as a university to bend over like this.
Re:This is Sick (Score:2, Informative)
The thing is the DMCA basically requires that; if they fail to shut down at the first complaint, then they're considered to be as guilty of any infringement that occurs as the party that actually infringes.
Re:This is Sick (Score:2, Interesting)
One thing that sucks about this guilty-until-proven-innocent law (from a reluctant enforcer's perspective) is that an overwhelming majority of the tim
Re:This is Sick (Score:2)
Re:This is Sick (Score:2)
How hard would it be to spoof an IP (Score:3, Funny)
Say of the school admin, Dean's office, etc. and send packets on a port commonly used by P2P?
Also, is there a reward for turning someone in on this violation? Sounds like a money maker for some poor geek who happens to be able to fake traffic.
Re:How hard would it be to spoof an IP (Score:2)
If you're on campus, you don't have to spoof. Trust me on this one. The administration is filled with morons, and the networking staff at various departments are so incompetant that anyone at the level of pre-script-kiddie or greater can run wild without getting caught.
The University of Utah is a fucking joke. This DCMA warning can be laughed away, just like every other fatwa that is uttered blindly by the usual people.
And yes, you do get a reward for turning people in... if you're at the UofU at least.
My school is to retarded to implement this (Score:3, Interesting)
Our IT department noticed that our machine was originating a very large volume of outgoing traffic. They ran NMAP, and saw
and said "Oh, they're running Gnutella." They pulled our plug, without even bothering to try and contact the machine's administrator or the club's advisor first.
This is not a joke, they really did.
It turned out that someone was legitimately downloading a legitimate copy of the non-commercial QNX iso from our legitimate public FTP site.
Re:My school is to retarded to implement this (Score:2)
Actually, this raises a good point. Why aren't rpm's distributed via P2P? Why don't blogs distribute stories this way?
The problem with P2P networks is that they are mostly used for piracy. This is not a property of the protocol but of the people who have chosen to use the protocol.
Legal p2p (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, there are some p2p systems which do the sort of things you mentioned. Most people don't know about them because off all the hype which says P2P is only for "free" movies and music--much of the hype is spread by the MPAA and RIAA themselves.
Off the top of my head, The Circle [thecircle.org.au] had an IRC like chatting system, a group messaging system (kind of like Usenet, kind of not--could distribute blogs with it), and last time I checked, they were working on a system which works with apt-get to distribute Debian pa
It doesnt seem too bad... (Score:2, Insightful)
In resposne to this, the university simply monitors the amount of outgoing traffic, and if this goes over an amount deemed 'excessive' (I'd guess somewhere around a gig over a day/week, possibly a little less) then they cut you off wit
No Counter-Notification Allowed? (Score:1, Interesting)
Utah? (Score:2)
Dear University of Utah (Score:2)
As a member of the software industry, I would like to lodge a complaint against the backbone of your network for sending and receiving copyrighted materials. By reading this note, I order you to shut down your backbone to your network immediately to prevent further infringement of my copyright. Yes this will surely cause you some headache, but I'm sure the rest of the world won't miss you or your heavy-handed practices one bit.
Your cooperat
Nothing new (Score:1)
This one has been brewing for a couple years now. I've recieved threats several time despite the fact that I don't waste my time with file swapping.
All students were emailed about this, I'd post it, but it looks like someone else already took care of it.
This letter is a sad joke. (Score:2, Insightful)
From the looks of things, they are complaining if you are serving illegal stuff. Again no one states anything about downloading the same material. Quote:
File sharing software is most commonly used to download music and other
media. Many do not realize that this software may turn your personal
computer into a server, or upload site, even if that was not your
intent. Files on your network connected PC may then be illegally shared
with every other person connected t