p2pnet news | RIAA News:- Tufts freshman Jonathan Evans used to run Tufts Direct Connect, a service he created on open source DC++.

But ‘used to’ is the operative phrase because thanks to Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG and their RIAA, TDC is no more.

File sharing is, “putting a significant number of our students at risk for legal action,” according to Judi Rennie, the university’s information technology supervisor at Tufts Online.

“UIT has seen a one-third increase this year in the amount of complaints sent by the entertainment industry,” says the Tufts Daily, going on:

“Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman said that UIT forwarded a batch of 20 pre-litigation notices to his office last week. Pre-litigation notices offer students whom the industry has caught illegally sharing files the opportunity to avoid a lawsuit by settling. Settlements usually force students to pay thousands of dollars to the industry.”

Actually, the RIAA hasn’t caught anyone doing anything. It scams school authorities across America into threatening their own students with extortionate demand notices and some of the students literally incriminate themselves to the RIAA, admitting guilt where there was none, and paying $3,000 in the hope of avoiding a civil lawsuit.

“RIAA Marketing 101,” p2pnet posted recently.How to force your owners’ customers to buy ‘product’.”

We went on >>>

Hound them. Harass them. Label them ‘criminals’ and ‘thieves’. Call them liars. Humiliate them in the mainstream media every chance you get.

That’s The Big 4 Way, the Big 4 being Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, the venal members of the organised music gang.

As a continuation of Stage II of their bizarre sue ‘em all marketing and sales plan, the labels have set their RIAA loose on a new batch of students at universities across the country.

Under what the RIAA’s Cara Duckworth has actually been quoted as calling ‘cool new legal services,’ they’re using staffs and administrations —- funded not by the corporate music industry, but by taxpayers —- to serve extortion letters to students, trying to hit them for upwards of three thousand dollars each.

Come through with a payment, buy our product from one of the corporate ’services’ we’ve shoehorned into your schools, and you’ll be safe, they say.

No wonder the RIAA people figure they’ve scored.

But far from protecting the students from a possible civil court appearance, the data might well be used against them sometime in the future – and the RIAA hasn’t had to do a thing. Schools staffs have done it for them.

However, what’s being heavily promoted by the Big 4 as a huge success in reality means absolutely nothing.

Nothing?

So far, the RIAA has talked University administrators into handing out around 5,500 of these ‘pre-settlement’ demands, as they’re called.

But given that the US Census Bureau Back to School: 2006-2007 was projecting 7,600,000 students would be enrolled in American colleges and universities by that fall, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the RIAA student victimisation programme is going nowhere, and fast.

In addition, the RIAA onslaught is slowly and definitely polarising universities.

On one hand, you have universities such as Ohio which is doing everything it can to act as an upfront corporate copyright cop, even to the extent of spending scarce school funds on RIAA-sponsored ‘filter’ technology in the hope of keeping Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG and the RIAA happy.

And on the other you have teaching institutions such as Maine and San Francisco whose law students are actively helping RIAA victims, as well as lawyers who are defending them.

At Tuft, “We actually don’t monitor downloading or uploading,” Tufts Daily has Rennie saying “We’re not proactively seeking that stuff out. It’s only when it’s brought to us from an outside source” that UIT punishes students.”

But, “university officials did tell Evans, the freshman, that an outside source could potentially discover Tufts’ DC++ network and force them to punish him for running the peer-to-peer network, he told the Daily. The program was popular because, if used correctly, it was able to avoid detection by outside sources who sought to track Tufts network users’ Internet use.”

Evans said he shut down Tufts Direct Connect after a meeting with Rennie and Marj Minnihg, manager of networks and special projects at UIT.

“This move affected many Tufts students,” says the story, adding:

“Our estimate is roughly 20 percent of the residential students were using it at some point,” Rennie said.

Reitman’s office sent an e-mail to the student body on Feb. 12 warning of the dangers of DC++. “The Direct Connect hub and network has been touted as being a ’safe’ way to share copyrighted files, including music and movies,” the e-mail said. “These assurances could not be farther from the truth.”

But according to Evans, users who correctly follow DC++’s directions cannot be caught by monitors outside of the Tufts network, like the RIAA. “The basic premise is that the whole safety factor of the network is that people who report people for illegal downloading are outside officials on outside networks,” he said. “As long as UIT is not working to actually try to go and see what people are doing … then it’s not an issue.”

There is a potential for misuse, however, which could get students caught sharing files by outside sources. “DC++, if it’s misconfigured, could connect to outside networks, which would be vulnerable,” Evans said. “Because people accidentally don’t follow directions … no one can guarantee safety.”

Rennie said it was “absolutely” possible that the entertainment industry representatives had not picked up on Tufts’ DC++ network.

Evans was reluctant to shut down the Tufts Direct Connect network because he had hoped to use the network to distribute legal materials. “It’s a little disappointing for me because I’d hoped to make something out of it more than what people had been using it for,” he said.

“I do a lot of work with … musical artists, and I had hoped to make the network a way for artists to distribute their work around campus – stuff that’s legal and legitimate like that.”

Reitman and Evans both said they do not think shutting down Tufts Direct Connect will significantly decrease the amount of illegal downloading on campus. It will “probably not” have an effect, Reitman said.

Downloading is, “something that I think needs to be approached in a creative way,” he adds in the story.

“I think the industry needs to get creative and find other ways to stop it, because the number of students who seem to do it [demonstrates that current measures are] not enough to make students feel vulnerable …”

Said Educause recently:

“Campuses that offer legal downloading services typically must charge a student fee to cover the expense. Taken across all campuses, this practice could represent a transfer of over $400 million annually from higher education to the entertainment industry while raising the cost of higher education.

“Most colleges and universities have already considered offering legal, online music or movie services. Their students, however, have often told them they do not want to use or pay for these services because they do not carry musicians that the students want, do not work with Apple iPods, etc. The failure of industry to create and offer attractive downloading services should not lead to a federal solution in which colleges and universities must bear an additional financial burden so that industry can sell more of these services.”

[NOTE - p2pnet is running a special reader's survey. It only takes a minute - literally. Please click here. Cheers! And thanks ... Jon]

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Also See:
Tufts Daily – Student terminates Direct Connect as RIAA turns up heat on colleges, March 3, 2008
7,600,000 students – RIAA continues futile university attacks, February 25, 2008
RIAA-sponsored ‘filter’ technology – Ohio University buys RIAA ’silver bullet’, February 28, 2008
Maine – Maine law students vs the RIAA, December 28, 2007
San Francisco – Dear p2pnet: about those law students ., February 28, 2008
raising the cost of higher education – Educause against anti-college act, February 21st, 2008

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