Stanford University: copyright cop
p2pnet news | Freedom:- Stanford University is going whole hog as an upfront entertainment cartel copyright cop with its own students as the victims.
It’s fired up a scheme to financially penalise anyone who strays from the path dictated by the music and movie industries.
“If students fail to remove illegal digital downloads from their computers within 48 hours of being asked to do so, the university will sever their campus Internet connections, and they will have to pay $100 to get them restored,” says the San Francisco Chronicle, going on:
A second offense will require a $500 reconnection fee.
A third infraction will cost students $1,000.
The university has already had to fork out salaries for three new people hired to deal with the flood of complaints pumped out by the entertainment cartels.
The story has Stanford lawyer Lauren Schoenthaler saying the university launched its new policy following a steep increase, “in the number of piracy complaints it received from the Recording Industry Association of America”.
It was also listed among the, “25 worst copyright offenders issued by the Motion Picture Association of America,” says the Chronicle.
“To field the complaints, Stanford has had to devote three full-time employees, which Schoenthaler called a waste of university resources,” it says, adding:
“Fred von Lohmann, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, said that universities aren’t taking a more aggressive stance against file sharing simply to protect students from lawsuits. Congressional committees, encouraged by the entertainment industry, have held hearings about illegal music downloading, which has universities scared that they could lose federal funding, he said.
The San Francisco Chronicle also has him saying:
“I’m reminded about on-campus drinking,” he said. “I think everyone agrees that universities have a responsibility, but no one would agree that they install surveillance cameras in front of fraternity houses on campus.”
It doesn’t say who’ll be the beneficiary of the new Stanford copyright enforcement project.
Also See:
San Francisco Chronicle – UC Berkeley, Stanford crack down on illegal downloading, September 5, 2007
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September 5th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
How exactly do they plan on enforcing this? They could easily track students’ downloading habits the way the RIAA does, but it would be impossible to know whether or not a file was on their computers (or whether or not the files were legally purchased for that matter) unless it was being shared on a P2P network. What are they going to do, install spyware on everyone’s PC? I’d like to see them try to get away with this.
September 5th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
So they will keep track of the actual files on the computers of the students?
What if the song was legally obtained?
What if the student changes the file type to something not an audio file, will they do a detailed check or each file?
Tracking internet usage is one thing, checking files on computers they do not own is another.
September 5th, 2007 at 4:50 pm
on second look at full article, it isnt too bad
only students sent letter are effected, and they have 48 hours from then to remove the content. However, they do allow a student to prove his innocence from a computer expert, which could get a student out of a lawsuit (or have good ammo against the RIAA, a university computer expert saying they are perfectly innocent.) So they do not just accept the letters at face value. They do nothing to the internet unless the student ignores the warning rather than proving themselves or removing the content. Even if one loses internet for a bit, they dont cut off access from non private connections (so you still can use computers there)
While I still do think the universities should fight against the original lawsuit, this is not as bad as it originally seemed.
September 5th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
It’s still pretty bad. Would you want anyone going through your private files?
September 5th, 2007 at 8:15 pm
This is totally ridiculous, no one has been proven to have actually done anything wrong. If I was a Stanford student and had my connection severed because of a threat letter from a private organization with proven bad fact gathering (illegal even), and was then charged a “punitive fee” to have service that is included in the price of my tuition turned back on…well, seems like a pretty good breach of contract lawsuit. These schools are putting themselves in a really bad position trying to pander to the RIAA/MPAA.
September 5th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
I know the University’s policies may seem strict, but from personally seeing how much it has affected our network and how much work it has cost our network admins, I can only say that these policies are very fair and very reasonable. First of all, the University does NOT go through private files or computers. It merely passes on the DMCA complaint to the student, who can either acknowledge it, and pay a fine to the university to (rightly) compensate it for the work it has to go through to process the complaint, or the student can contest it, and the University can review the student’s computer, and the university will help the student file a counter-complaint to the complaining agency. The university is careful to protect the student’s identity from the complaining agency as well. Unless a subpoena of issued, the University has a policy of not releasing the student’s name or ID. Also, I’m not being supportive of the RIAA or MPAA at all (in fact, I quite detest them) when I say that almost all the complaints are valid, meaning a student has indeed downloaded copyrighted media illegally. Yes, many people do it, and yes, it has become commonly accepted, but in the end, after honest reflection, I think we still have to realize that it is still illegal under intellectual property laws, and an institution of higher learning like Stanford, who is certainly interested in intellectual property rights, should respect copyright laws, even if the enforcement agency is unforgivingly heavy-handed.
September 6th, 2007 at 6:18 am
It is interesting to see the apologists have abandoned simple-minded insults in favour of supposedly reasoned arguments.
September 6th, 2007 at 7:24 am
Here is a simpiler solution for the university.
Install a Sonicwall on the outside connection and block all P2P traffic.
I did this for a client as a trial to stop some enployees from eating up all the bandwidth and it worked like a charm.
It also has a built in AV/spyware filter which has reduced their virus problems from 10 a year to 1 a year.
September 6th, 2007 at 10:09 am
At the University of Idaho (notice how they have received NO threat letters to date) they use a network hardware appliance (packetshaper) to “throttle” all p2p traffic to a crawl. If a professor, say, in the GIS department, needs to grab large files from NASA or whatever, they can ask for bandwidth for a certain period of time to their subnet and get it. This way, if students want to download files they are not “prevented” from it, but it takes a very long time. This seems like a happy medium, and has, so far, kept them under the radar (unless none of the students actually upload/download any song files). Perhaps other universities should do this also?
Point two: students, don’t forget that FERPA protects you *very* well, and you really should fight the lawsuits. The threat of the university getting sued by a student for a FERPA violation WILL make them very likely to help you if that possibility is mentioned…
Finally, I wonder, why hasn’t any serious coder taken the source for one of the better p2p apps and changed it to read and use any of the available off-shore proxy lists for their connections? That way you are truly anonymous when downloading. Not sure how it would work for sharing files though, need more thought put into it I guess.
September 7th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
Stanford University is no stranger to packetshaping and filtering. It is listed as one of the clients of Packeteer, which provides this functionality. Either the hardware hasn’t been working as planned, or Stanford is opting for other solutions. Or maybe they don’t want to ratchet down P2P traffic entirely, as some small portion of it may indeed be legal.