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Piracy on College Campus

Pegun

Pegun

Golden Member
Interestingly, this seems to be a taboo subject on this site specifically, but I've read a number of articles lately about it. I had a conversation with my roommate the other night on Piracy and then I read This link about the higher education opportunity demanding that colleges find ways to reduce piracy. What do people think about this? It's not like it won't happen either way; as one commenter to the article says, thumb drives are far more common today than 20 years ago and faster than most networks so it can never be stopped. But the same thing has been happening for years since the widespread ability to share audio tapes and before that it was passing books between friends.

My favorite quote: "It?s ok, it?s not like Universities are established for the purpose of shareing thought and informat? oh crap?"

Pull up the lawn chairs and throw out an opinion
 
The worst part about many college's efforts to stop piracy is that they also end up stopping other perfectly legal internet services from working or performing normally.
 
Originally posted by: Xavier434
The worst part about many college's efforts to stop piracy is that they also end up stopping other perfectly legal internet services from working or performing normally.
Click to expand...

yep
 
What about the idea of statistics? In the article I posted before they have a number of linked articles which explain that it is impossible to come up with a definite statistic of jobs lost of piracy committed mainly because of faulty statistics and "chicken and the egg" problems. Also, once an organization does something to detect piracy, they have the obligation to do something about it, therefore, a number of colleges just don't bother. Any ideas?
 
Originally posted by: Anubis
Originally posted by: Xavier434
The worst part about many college's efforts to stop piracy is that they also end up stopping other perfectly legal internet services from working or performing normally.
Click to expand...

yep
Click to expand...

Yup, and schools will do one of 2 things. They'll either keep their restrictive stuff up and spawn problems with students (my sister's school) or they'll reduce the guards to ensure smooth sailing (my school).
 
Statistics used for those reasons come with wide margins of error very often because they cannot accurately show how many pirates would buy the same products they download if they were not able to pirate them for free. Even if you were to some how prove that every piece of software that was illegally downloaded would have been purchased it still does not take into consideration that the money that would have been used to buy the pirated software is now being spent on other products of other businesses helping to create and maintain jobs in their industries.

Keep in mind that all of that doesn't make pirating any more "right" or legal. It is just the way it is.
 
Originally posted by: Anubis
Originally posted by: Xavier434
The worst part about many college's efforts to stop piracy is that they also end up stopping other perfectly legal internet services from working or performing normally.
Click to expand...

yep
Click to expand...

yep. Although here at school, I am not aware of any formal firewall blocks to any type of service. I believe netbios is the only thing that is actually blocked.
That, and it's not hard at all to disguise p2p traffic. With torrents, they are great for legal purposes too, and that is probably why torrent traffic isn't being blocked here at school. But yeah, even with the traffic being legal, just creating the traffic can make the school worry, because what happens is any illegal activity found results in the RIAA or MPAA coming to the school and mandating the school take action. The school has a system of warnings iirc, first warning the network is shut off until you call and tell them you removed the downloaded material. Second I believe is the same. The third results in a trip down to the school's justice-like system and typically results in expulsion.
But yeah, just change the port it's used, and force RC4 encryption, just to prevent any potential network blocks. VOIP uses RC4, so it'll really just look like VOIP traffic if you use that port. They could look at the data transfer rates, but I seriously doubt they will even investigate that until it gets pointed out somehow.
 
my university so far hasn't really given a crap. all they've done is non-campus (internet) bandwidth to 2gb/day per mac address (easily spoofed). if they receive a copyright infringement notice, the offending mac address get kicked off the network for 45 days

people still set up dc++ shares with tons of stuff, which isn't bandwidth limited since its on the internal network
 
Originally posted by: Pegun
Interestingly, this seems to be a taboo subject on this site specifically, but I've read a number of articles lately about it. I had a conversation with my roommate the other night on Piracy and then I read This link about the higher education opportunity demanding that colleges find ways to reduce piracy. What do people think about this? It's not like it won't happen either way; as one commenter to the article says, thumb drives are far more common today than 20 years ago and faster than most networks so it can never be stopped. But the same thing has been happening for years since the widespread ability to share audio tapes and before that it was passing books between friends.

My favorite quote: "It?s ok, it?s not like Universities are established for the purpose of shareing thought and informat? oh crap?"

Pull up the lawn chairs and throw out an opinion
Click to expand...

Ummm last I checked thumb drives weren't available until about 8 years ago. So first bolded part fails.

As for audio tapes, they are analog sources. For this reason each subsequent copy suffers from signal degredation. After around 8 generations it has lost a significant portion of it's information. Record companies weren't all that worried about it because of this. Digital OTOH results in a 1:1 copy with no signal loss, which means exact duplicates are easy to make. This is the major issue RIAA/MPAA have with pirates.

Also sharing between friends could be illegal depending on what type of IP it is. Copying Doom on floppies between systems certainly is illegal, but no way of really enforcing it. It just depends.

That guy with that quote is ignorant. Universities might be there to share information and learn, but that does not mean copyrights/IP shouldn't be protected. Sharing of information and thoughts != not paying for music/movies/games/etc. Music/movies/games/etc is not information the same way that the Law of Gravity is information.
 
Originally posted by: vshah
my university so far hasn't really given a crap. all they've done is non-campus (internet) bandwidth to 2gb/day per mac address (easily spoofed). if they receive a copyright infringement notice, the offending mac address get kicked off the network for 45 days

people still set up dc++ shares with tons of stuff, which isn't bandwidth limited since its on the internal network
Click to expand...
This is why it's a fight that can't be won IMO. Even if campuses lock down on their own networks, it's still easy enough to set up an open wireless network or something like that in the residence halls.
 
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