I logged onto my college account today and this was one of the news articles recently posted about copyright laws and the DMCA notices the colleges recieves. It also has a video and I was wondering what everyones thoughts were about the way colleges take a stand on the issue. I am curious how many of the notices are for specific files (like traps when the latest game/movie comes out) or its just p2p traffic and people are jumping on the bandwagon for money.
Copyright Infringement
York College receives frequent notices from recording, movie, and video game industry groups alerting the IT staff of students who are downloading or sharing copyrighted material. These notices provide information that the IT staff needs to track down the responsible students and take disciplinary action against them in accordance with the York CollegeDMCA andHEOA policies. To avoid violating copyright laws and remain in good standing at York College, it is highly recommended that you take steps to ensure that you do not have any illegal files or software on your computer. Follow this link for the most commonly used Peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing programs to make sure you do not have them installed on your computer: https://itkb.ycp.edu/article.php?id=771
York College would like all students to be aware that there are legal ways to find you favorite music or videos. Educause hosts a list of legal alternatives to obtain online content: http://www.educause.edu/legalcontent. Be sure to check it out and avoid violating copyright laws or tarnishing your academic record.
Watch our Video on Peer to Peer File Sharing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxIEDcLKIS4&feature
As a graduate I still make it a point to stay involved with what is happening at York College. I came across the "Copyright Infringement" article as it is a hot topic these days and it is important to understand the college's stance on the issue. I am unsure of the ISP which York uses but I am sure the IT staff knows if the ISP is participating in the Copyright Alert System (CAS) or the Six Strikes Plan. My concern with these programs is they they monitor the upload traffic coming form P2P connections but have no way of knowing what is actually being sent. This is a huge problem from an academic standpoint because there is a large amount of free content which will be picked up as P2P traffic and flagged even though it is completely legal. The most relevant example I can give is Linux distributions. This free operating system is widely used in the engineering community and mostly downloaded through P2P sharing because it is the fastest way to get it. This also goes for programs people write for Linux. If I wrote something for it and decided to share that with the world the most logical mean is P2P file sharing. To ask students to remove P2P clients is to restrict them from furthering their education in this case.
My second concern is this statement, "These notices provide information that the IT staff needs to track down the responsible students and take disciplinary action against them..." I would like to reference VPR Internationale v. Does 1-1017 (C.D. Ill.) as well as this article, IP Address Cannot Identify Individual. Wifi, MAC addresses, and IP addresses can all easily be cracked or spoofed to look like someone else. It would be unlawful to identify an individual by these means. Nor is it in an educational institution's best interest to bring harsh punishment against a student without properly educating him/her. I would be very upset to see York follow in the footsteps of the RIAA who bring down criminally large punishments on people and have publicly said not a penny of their lawsuit winnings will go to the copyright holders. It is in the best interest of York to protect students and their rights and educate them instead of throwing them to the sharks.
I liked your repsonse and your points are valid. But people also need to remember that it is in fact illegal to download content for free that is supposed to be purchased for money. People should be able to keep P2P applications on their computers because they in themselves are not illegal, just a means of sharing 1s and 0s. But its difficult to give sympathy if a person is always pirating content left and right. But yeah, it shouldn't be up to ISPs or colleges to be the police either and the extreme fines should be over with too.
This is the response I have goten back so far. On a Sunday interestingly enough.
[quote=IT Help Desk]Hello Salvatore, Thank you for contacting the IT Help Desk. We have received your request about your concerns about copyright infringement and are assigning it further. If you have any additional information to add or further questions, please feel free to reply to this email or call us[/quote]
my U has the same policy, almost word-for-word. you can't blame the schools, they are required by law to have a policy like this, and to enforce it. AFAIK, they don't act based soley on P2P traffic, as popular games, like LoL and I think WoW, use P2P systems for their updates and downloads.I also have Vuze on my comp, but it's never running, so the U doesn't care. our internet is actually quite open, as there a no filters, and no restrictions beyond the obvious.
as far as the MAC spoofing goes, that is a good point. however, at least on my campus, the wired and secure wifi are both tied to our mac adresses, which we register before we have network access. our wired network usues a MAC whitelist for each dorm hall. and our wifi uses both WPA2 encryption, with authentication requireing us to log in with our university account, as well as MAC verification. if someone tries to use our wifi, even if they have their own login, if they spoof their MAC, it locks their login out of the wifi.
also, my university is my ISP, the main campus in the Twin Cities handles most of the network admininstration, and I think that my internet physically comes from there, as I doubt that there is a dark fiber line that runs anywhere near here. that, or they run it all through a VPN.
[quote=Commissar]as far as the MAC spoofing goes, that is a good point. however, at least on my campus, the wired and secure wifi are both tied to our mac adresses, which we register before we have network access. our wired network usues a MAC whitelist for each dorm hall. and our wifi uses both WPA2 encryption, with authentication requireing us to log in with our university account, as well as MAC verification. if someone tries to use our wifi, even if they have their own login, if they spoof their MAC, it locks their login out of the wifi.[/quote]
It has been so long since I logged on to campus wifi I totally forgot about the authentication hoops they made us run through to get on. I can see how that makes it alot harder to fake. I would guess that the campus is set up by Comcast. I am pretty sure that was what we had for TV and its the only internet choice when I lived off campus.
possibly. my U is its own ISP, 100% self-managed. there's 5 campuses, and all of them have their net routed through the twin cities. comcast doesn't have speeds as fas as ours, I have 500mbit, and the twin cities has gigabit.
Ha, my campus internet is laughable for and educational institution. Ill have to ask someone to speed test it for me again but im pretty sure it was it was 20Mbps which is top teir DSL for the area I believe.
Got a long answer back. Apparently my College is an ISP and for a while they have been required to police their internet. Very interesting.
[quote=IT Help Desk]Salvatore,
Thank you for expressing your concerns regarding York College's practices regarding copyright infringement enforcement. As an institution of higher education and an ISP for its students, YCP is required to comply with the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). These laws prescribe that all higher education institutions must have programs for effectively combatting copyright infringement on their campuses. Rather than describe our program in this email, I encourage you to read YCP's HEOA ( https://itpolicies.ycp.edu/article.php?id=23) and DMCA ( https://itpolicies.ycp.edu/article.php?id=21) policies as they were linked in the original portal announcement that you are referencing.
As you will find when you read these policies, York College's goals are to protect the rights of students and educate them on copyright infringement, not to "throw anyone to the sharks." The College regularly receives infringement notices from the RIAA and MPAA and such notices are handled completely internal to the college where no information about our users is disclosed to any claimant organization unless we are presented with a subpoena. We have the ability to positively identify internal systems involved in downloading or uploading copyrighted material by taking the external IP and port information from the infringement notices and correlating those pieces of information with event data from our firewall, DHCP server, and Network Access Control server. This process allows us to detect if any network or link-layer spoofing is occurring. As part of our process we allow students to dispute any accusation of copyright infringement and, although we have never had a student file a dispute, we would certainly take any such dispute seriously.
If you have any further questions or concerns regarding YCP's copyright infringement policies and practices, please feel free to contact me directly.[/quote]
it's no different than any other college. actually, I don't think it's uncommon for more... traditional 4-year colleges and universities (i.e. not a community college or tech school) to be ISPs for the campus.
holds in hopes of getting internet as a public utility. if a campus can be an isp for its students why cant a city be an isp for its residents. fuck big business for making us consumers pay more for less and charge outragous prices. if i wasent getting 15/ 20mega bit a second for $26 at a promo rate then i would be stuck with 2mbs up and .5 mbs down for $30
I would love to see it as a public utility like water, sewers and roads. hell, where I am, airports are managed by a single commiission that has authority over all the airports in the metro area, spanning at least 6 or 7 counties, and god only knows how many cities and towns... why can't they do the same sort of thing for internet... or do it like my local fire department is: a government-owned non-profit company that serves multiple cities, but is still managed by agreements between the city councils....