p2pnet - rss feed: RIAA-compliant Indiana U has 2nd thoughts
p2pnet news MPAA News | RIAA News:- Indiana University has a scary “Are You Legal” site complete with an ominous logo with a giant eyeball behind it.
There’s even a T-shirt carrying the same message.
The university levies a $50 fine for the first notice officials receive about a student’s alleged improper sharing of copyrighted music or videos, and cuts off his or her access to the school network if he or she fails a 10-question quiz within 24 hours.
In other words, says Doug Lederman in his Inside Higher Ed article, you couldn’t find a more compliant (according to Hollywood and the Big 4 music cartel lights) school than Indiana.
But, Indiana officials, “are now discussing whether they should continue to respond to complaints from the recording industry with the same aggressiveness,” he says.
And that’s because administrators are beginning to question the legitimacy of the notices Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG’s RIAA sends accusing network users of illegally sharing music.
What !?!?! Heresy !!!! How can that be?
It’s because like many colleges and universities, “officials at Indiana have seen an eye-popping increase in the number of complaints they’ve received at a time when campus administrators say they have not seen any sort of rise in traffic that would suggest more piracy,” says the story.
Last month p2pnet reported universities across the land are being bombarded with RIAA extortion letters.
The story is now being widely covered on- and offline and we recently posted at least 18 universities had received an inordinate number of DMCA notices.
The implication was: students across America had suddenly ramped up their file sharing activities.
“Clearly something has changed,” but, “we don’t believe it’s a sudden massive spontaneous nationwide coast-to-coast spike in file-sharing activity,” Steve Worona, director of policy and networking programs and founding director of the Educause/Cornell Institute for computer policy and law, told p2pnet when we asked him if he knew what was behind the notices.
Nor, he said, have the RIAA or MPAA had anything to say beyond what’s being reported in various media.
‘ … major change in the software and hardware’
Harvard again seems to be an exception to what’s fast becoming a rule.
It’s never received an RIAA extortion letter and so far as we know, it’s hasn’t yet received one of the DMCA notices which are causing alarm and confusion at universities everywhere in America.
But other universities aren’t having the same luck, if indeed that’s what it is.
Have the Big 4’s RIAA, “altered the standards it uses to allege illegal behavior, targeting not only instances in which computer users have actively shared music illegally, but instances in which they have stored downloaded music in a folder visible to other users, opening the way to a potential violation,” Lederman wonders, going on >>>
That has officials at Indiana and elsewhere reconsidering how seriously they take the threats the recording industry aims at their students, which has been part of a continuing disagreement between the entertainment industries and higher education leaders over whether the recording and movie industries are disproportionately singling out college students (and their host institutions) for the broader Internet piracy problem.
“We’ve been handling the notices as allegations of actual infringement,” said Mark S. Bruhn, chief IT security and policy officer in Indiana’s Information Technology Policy Office. “But if they are not allegations of illegal behavior, but of possible future infringement, we may wind up discarding them.”
RIAA mouthperson Car Duckworth is issuing platitudes, but failing to give any coherent reason for the sudden increase, and in an interview yesterday, RIAA dissembler-in-chief Cary Sherman, “specifically rebutted the idea that the industry had altered its criteria for going after illegal downloaders,” says Inside Higher Ed, continuing:
“Sherman attributed the ‘phenomenal jump’ in the number of complaints to a ‘major change in the software and hardware’ its major vendor uses to detect online infringement’.”
But, “It’s the same procedures, the same standards, the same list of copyrighted works that we’re using,” Sherman says in the story,
“The only changes, he said, were a more efficient software and an increased number of servers powering the industry’s searching for possible shared material.”
For ‘more efficient software’, might one read that used by MediaSentry, the so-called investigator whose techniques had been discredited by experts such as Dutch P2P guru Dr Johan Pouwelse and which was specifically banned from operating in Massachusetts by the state police?
Says Sherman, “We don’t think there’s any more infringement going on. We just think there’s more detection of infringement.”
Meanwhile, “most institutions in the Council on Institutional Cooperation, which includes the Big Ten universities and the University of Chicago, reported big rises in a recent survey,” Lederman has Mark S. Bruhn, chief IT security and policy officer in Indiana’s Information Technology Policy Office, saying.
But, “he and other officials at Indiana have not seen a concomitant increase in actual network traffic, and that the campus is actually emptying out as students finish their final exams and head home,” leading Indiana IT administrators to, “seek an explanation for the dramatic upturn from contractors that the recording companies use to monitor possible illegal file sharing, and Bruhn said that one of the contractors had said that because one student had one of a record company’s songs available to other users in his or her public index of songs, the university would be receiving a DMCA notice.”
“Unauthorized copies” of copyrighted recordings.
Enter the “making available” theory.
It’s another bad day for the RIAA, p2pnet posted a week ago, going on >>>
The case it and its masters, Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG, have been trying to build against a husband and wife accused of being illegal online distributors of copyrighted digital music has taken another nasty turn —- for Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG and the RIAA.
RIAA lawyer Ira Schwartz had tried to argue MP3s made from legally bought CDs and stored on Pamela and Jeffery Howell’s PC were “unauthorized copies” of copyrighted recordings.
“I couldn’t believe it when I read that,” said Recording Industry vs The People’s Ray Beckerman.
“The basic principle in the law is that you have to distribute actual physical copies to be guilty of violating copyright. But recently, the industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your computer is a violation.”
In a case centering on New York social worker Tenise Barker, Connecticut district judge Janet Bond Arterton threw out out the RIAA’s infamous ‘making available claim which, “comprises the bottom line for all the Big 4 P2P file sharing cases,” p2pnet posted in February.
“Prove it!” - she said in effect.
This time around, the RIAA was demanding a summary judgement against the Howells, claiming they’d infringed Big 4 copyrights.
But, “Prove it,” said judge Neil V. Wake, in effect.
As Beckerman puts it, “the judge has totally eviscerated the RIAA’s theories of ‘making available’ and ‘offering to distribute’.”
“That has been among the battleground issues in court cases over peer to peer file sharing, and the terrain remains disputed, even though two of three relatively recent court rulings (including last month’s denial of a summary judgment in the closely watched upcase) have rejected the recording industry’s argument that making content available for possible download is just as much copyright infringement as actual dissemination of the material,” says Lederman in Inside Higher Ed, adding:
“That legal fight is among the factors that has Bruhn and other college officials wondering if the recording industry is altering its approach to try to buttress its political and legal standing, especially given the fact that the statistics entertainment officials have leaned on to persuade Congress to target higher education for a crackdown on downloading were acknowledged early this year to be flawed.
“Could the industry, they wonder, be ramping up its allegations against college students now to try to reinforce its case to the courts and to Congress that colleges are, in fact, a hotbed of illegal file sharing activity?
But Sherman scoffed at that notion, declaring, “We have been asking the contractor for years to increase the computing power of its effort, and to search more to detect infringement,” he said Monday, according to Lederman.
“‘We’ve had a standing request to maximize efficiency for what they do for us…. We didn’t even know they were putting a new system online.”
And, “Despite the timing, there is ‘no connection whatsoever’ between the upturn and either the court cases suggesting that actual infringement needs to occur for a finding of copyright violation or the perceived need for new data to show Congress that illegal file sharing is rampant on campuses, Sherman said.
” ‘We would have preferred this uptick five years ago’.”
Definitely stay tuned.
(Thanks, Ken)
.
.Stumble It!
Inside Higher Ed - Mysterious Multiplication of Copyright Complaints, May 6, 2008
RIAA extortion letters - Sudden ‘huge’ spike in school DMCA notices, April 25, 2008
at least 18 universities - 18 universities named in RIAA DMCA attacks, May 1, 2008
an exception - Why does Harvard escape the RIAA?, May 3, 2008
discredited by experts - Johan Pouwelse vs RIAA’s Doug Jacobson, February 21, 2008
specifically banned - RIAA MediaSentry violates C&D order, April 10, 2008
p2pnet - Another bad day for the RIAA, April 29, 2008
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May 6th, 2008 at 9:08 am
My school has had that picture up for months! It’s everywhere. I go to Plymouth State University in Plymouth, NH. They are slaves to the RIAA/MPAA… If both schools have that picture, it’s probably directly from those cartels.
May 6th, 2008 at 11:04 am
Anyone think it’s just that with the universities school year ending the RIAA’s pool of $$ from their extortion compaign would have to come to an end? So they are trying to hit as many students as possible.
After all they been on the loosing end of a few battles lately and so obviously they need as much ‘lobbying’ cash as they can muster as fast as they can get it, so they can ‘rectify’ this obvious oversite, by spreading the lobby money.
Not to mention there are elections soon and they will need as much ‘grease’ as possible to ensure they ‘right’ people get in.
May 6th, 2008 at 11:28 am
Dear Students:
Relakks.com.
Look into it.
May 6th, 2008 at 11:58 am
“Copyright agents are watching you….”
Please tell me this is a joke.
One thing I admire about this site is that they make no effort to hide the fact that the very same music industry that depends on the financial support of their consumers are the ones suing those same consumers.
If the students at IU have any intelligence whatsoever, it shouldn’t take them longer than 2 seconds to see the irony. If only the school admin were that smart…..
May 6th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
We will just spread some pest killer on these parasites in the music industry and we will not hear about it ever again. It’s like geting read of cookroaches or flees. Same problem same solution.
May 6th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
We will just spread some pest killer on these parasites in the music industry and we will not hear about it ever again. It’s like geting rid of cookroaches or flees. Same problem same solution.
May 6th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
I wonder if the fact that Media Sentry has been banned from operating in Massachusetts might be a reason why Harvard is untouched?
May 6th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
The banning of Media Sentry operating in Massachusetts is a recent affair. It does not explain the past lack of activity up to that date.
May 6th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
“ominous logo with a giant eyeball behind it”
Lol, strangely appropriate, and insightful logo.
How many of these “50 dollar fines” were the result of illegal searches, or worse, fraudulent claims based on misinterpreted data?
May 6th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
If my school displayed signs like that I’d personally rip them down or deface them. I’d say the reason for the large sudden increase of DMCA notices is that they know they’re illegal now, and they want to strike before anyone knows what’s going on.