Comments on: Stanford University: copyright cop

By: Semi disinterested party

Semi disinterested party — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 04:05:06 +0000

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.

By: a UI Alum

a UI Alum — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 16:09:33 +0000

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.

By: iHuman

iHuman — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 13:24:05 +0000

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.

By: Maurie

Maurie — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 12:18:27 +0000

It is interesting to see the apologists have abandoned simple-minded insults in favour of supposedly reasoned arguments.

By: A Stanford Student

A Stanford Student — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 03:33:19 +0000

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.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 02:15:02 +0000

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.

By: Carlos

Carlos — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 00:54:10 +0000

It’s still pretty bad. Would you want anyone going through your private files?

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 22:50:24 +0000

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.

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 22:12:48 +0000

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.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 20:46:02 +0000

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.