Many Universities Spending $100K/Year Enforcing P2P Rules 323
Scott Jaschik writes "A new study documents just how much money colleges are spending on enforcing P2P rules through software license fees, hardware, and other costs. Many private universities are spending more than $100,000 a year — a major allocation of funds. An article in Inside Higher Ed explains the study and its findings."
Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
They could use the money and get more bandwidth.
Re:Or... (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory quote, I suppose (Score:4, Funny)
Chris: BOOBIES!!
Lois: Chris, That's enough! Well I'm sure glad to be out of there
Peter: You said it Lois, what those people are doing just ain't natural.
Chris: BOOBIES!
Lois: Did you hear me young man?
Meg: I don't know what the big deal was? I thought they were nice.
Chris: BOOBIES!!
Lois: Peter?
Peter: Do it.
(Everybody besides Chris puts on sunglasses and Lois reveals the Neuralizer from Men in Black, and uses it on Chris)
Lois: Did you have fun at the circus today Chris?
Chris: Elephants are bigger in person!
Re:Obligatory quote, I suppose (Score:5, Interesting)
I know that a lot of people aren't taking this issue to heart, and a lot of people agree that relative to the university budget, this isn't a lot of money to be spent. However, people need to stop seeing this as a fraction of a large budget, and start seeing it for what it truly is. It isn't until the economy start to depreciate that people see the value of small numbers, and if they would have seen it earlier, it would be helping them out more in desperate times. Just last year, my university paid for Carlos Mencia to do some stand up. Apart from the fact that he's a terrible comedian that did the exact act that anyone can see on comedy central, I'm sure they spent somewhere in the area of the amount that it would cost to keep our multimillion dollar gymnasium a bit cooler for the rest of the year. When you waste that kind of money on something useless, you're not doing your job of keeping university priorities strait. What my university essentially said, is that it's important for some hack to tell everyone that Mexicans eat burritos, so we have to sacrifice comfort when working out. Hell, the robotics club could have used a fraction of that for a better processor on our land vehicle.
Re:Obligatory quote, I suppose (Score:5, Insightful)
Good post.
Another example on a more-personal level: I have a credit card that gives me 5% off gasoline and food. It's only ~50 cents per fillup or 5 cents per hamburger, which is no big deal, but those pennies quickly accumulate. In just this year alone, I've received $300 in rebates. That's enough money to pay three months worth of electricity bills.
Small amounts add-up to big amounts. Small wastes add-up to huge wastes & internal corruption.
Re:Obligatory quote, I suppose (Score:4, Funny)
In just this year alone, I've received $300 in rebates.
Then you either filled your car up about 600 times per last year (twice a day) or you ate 6,000 hamburgers (20 per day.) Those are amazing numbers!
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That's not such a stretch. Figure $100 worth of groceries times 40 weeks == $4000. Plus gasoline expenses. Plus 1% "on all other purchases" like hotel stays. It adds up.
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Unless they require that you buy the gas and food at places are are a bit more expensive in the first place or the card has fees and an above average interest rate.
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I *never* carry a balance. I don't want to pay interest.
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Why do universities spend so much on P2P? Is it just to avoid the legal fees of the RIAA possibly going after them? Couldn't they just allocate a certain amount of bandwidth to each student (maybe like 512k or so) and let them
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I'm sorry but hearing Carlos Mencia say the word "beaner" for the umpteenth time NEVER grows old. The man is a comic genius. Sort of like a hispanic Richard Pryor except without the talent or creativity.
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You haven't heard then? [cosmicvariance.com]
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They could spend it on Lawyers and tell the RIAA to go screw itself.
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Plus, a lot less papers citing Wikipedia as a reference.
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Or...
Limit bandwidth access to just 128 kbit/s per dormroom. Although it's technically possible to do P2P sharing at that speed, most students won't bother, and that reduces the necessity to police the lines to almost nothing. More importantly that speed is still fast enough to hear streaming radio, access youtube, and/or check class websites.
If the students complain, and they will, advise them that the college internet is only meant to be used for learning, not for stealing movies or tv shows. Also advi
Re:Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony, EMI, Warner Bros, and Universal are stealing from Education, Tax Payers, and Musicians. Feel free to spread that.
Re:Or... (Score:5, Informative)
The college for which I work limits internet bandwidth in the dorms to 384kb/s per port. We still have many port disconnect notices each week due to illegal file sharing.
Access to any other "local" network resources is limited to 100mbit/s (the speed of the majority of our network). This allows them to work on "big data projects like astrophysics", and allows for plenty bandwidth to watch youtube/hulu/etc videos, check email, IM, etc.
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>>>not everyone is stealing when they use the internet.
Correct. And for those who are not stealing, they don't need any more than 128 kbit/s line. That's MORE than enough speed for emailing text or accessing websites. Heck, I access websites using a 50k phoneline, and it works just fine. Why a student "needs" (keyword) more than 128k makes no sense to me.
Remember: The college is providing this internet FOR FREE. They wouldn't have to do that. They could just not provide any internet at all.
Re:Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. I don't agree.
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>>>So, you are saying everyone using more than 128k is a pirate?
STRAWMAN ARGUMENT (logical fallacy). No I did not say that. Those words never left my mouth. Here is what I said: "Students don't need any more than 128 kbit/s line... for emailing text or accessing class websites." You are in college to LEARN, and that's what the college provides free internet for. Not other un-necessary crap.
You have it better than I did. I only had a 28 kbit/s connection, and yet I still survived college.
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When my mother was learning Fortran, she didn't have a personal computer. No one did. She managed. Today, college kids are actually encouraged to bring personal computers to school. Can you believe that? Do you know many punch cards can be bought for the price of one computer? How many typewriter ribbons?
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How much?
Back in my college days, it cost $10 a month. The only kind of internet that $10 can buy is a 50k phoneline connection. If my college gave me anything faster than that, I'd consider myself really fortunate.
Re:Or... (Score:4, Insightful)
Correct. And for those who are not stealing, they don't need any more than 128 kbit/s line. That's MORE than enough speed for emailing text or accessing websites. Heck, I access websites using a 50k phoneline, and it works just fine. Why a student "needs" (keyword) more than 128k makes no sense to me.
So, when your OS provider decides to push a 300 Megabyte upgrade at you, what do you do?
128K also isn't enough for live video. Youtube extensively buffers at that speed, and the quality suffers quite a bit. Consider microscopy. Often with even the most well prepared samples, the salient details can be difficult to discern from the background. If bandwidth considerations result in extensive artifacts, those small details all but disappear.
This argument is simply a case of "back in my day, we trudged ten miles in the snow, uphill to and from school."
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> Consider microscopy. Often with even the most well prepared samples, the
> salient details can be difficult to discern from the background.
If you're working for a company which uses microsopes over the Internet which use lossy video compression to do real work, then I'd be very worried. Most medical and scientific organisations transfer images using very low-loss or lossless compression for precisely that reason. I can't think of why anybody would remotely be using a microsope over the Internet any
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What if someone wants to buy a video off of iTunes?
Are you saying they shouldn't be able to because they are in college?
What if someone just built a new computer and wants to get the most recent Ubuntu DVD iso?
Are you saying they should wait 3 days to do it?
What if one of their professors has PDFs online for their problem sets or as papers for them to r
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And for those who are not stealing, they don't need any more than 128 kbit/s line
Have you ever tried to get a GNU/Linux distro at 128Kb/s
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Yes. It took a few hours, but it still worked just fine when it was done.
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> stealing movies or tv shows
Please stop repeating this old bullshit. People copying information from another people, people passing information along to their fellow men are not stealing. They are exchanging information, like people, you know, have always done. You and your alike comming along, calling some of this information (in others people possesion) their "intellectual property" and trying to censor free information exchange between free people in order to make a buck borders on fascism.
Stop this
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>>>Except stealing fundamentally requires you to deprive the original owner of their property, which copyright infringement does not.
Yeah, but you can also steal a man's labor - which is why so many people joined Abolition movements in the early 1800s. Think about it: Would you be happy if, at the end of the week, your employer declares bankruptcy and doesn't pay your for the last two weeks/80 hours worth of work? Copyright infringement IS the same thing. It's theft of labor (an artist wo
What about Google? (Score:2, Insightful)
At one point, Google was using half the college's bandwidth running their search bot. Something people should think about next time they say "limit bandwidth" or "6mbs" is not needed for anything other than downloading MP3s from P2P.
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My college actually does this - MAC addresses of personal devices are registered to your Novell account. (Unregistered devices get no access!) Each user gets 113KB/s (I think they were going for 1000 Kbps) capped across all of their devices.
We have a massive packet shaper. Faculty and lab machines get higher priority, and the "server" subclass operates outside of the shaper. So, your massive astrophysics lab would probably be on a lab machine or a specially purposed machine, or you could ask nicely and
Do they let people who live near by to stay at the (Score:2)
Do they let people who live near by to stay at there own homes as I see legal issues with forcing them to pay for college owned apartments.
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Or... students could use an academic network for academic purposes only, and get their own bloody network connection if they want to download music? Y'know, just a thought.
Re:Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Or... (Score:5, Funny)
When I went to college all I had was a 28 kbit/s line, and I survived all four years. You could survive too on slower access.
I also had to walk uphill, through snow, to get to class.
No, really, I'm serious!
Penn State's snow removal team was not very good.
Re:Or... (Score:5, Funny)
And they'd move the snow while you were in class so you'd have to walk up hill through snow going home as well :D
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Luxury!! When I started we had 300 baud modems, not your fancy kilobits.
Of course, we were using line editors. Talk about uphill, both ways, in the snow. :-P
Cheers
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I remember those. I had a choice between a 300 bit/s modem and a 1200 bit/s modem for my shiny-new Commodore 128. Well the 1200 was $50 more, but four times faster (oooh), so naturally I chose the 1200 modem.*
* Notice I didn't say baud.
* A 1200 bit/s modem is actually 600 baud.
* A 2400 bit/s modem is also 600 baud (symbols/second).
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When I went to college all I had was a 28 kbit/s line, and I survived all four years.
Presumably that was before the widespread use of Facebook, MSN Messenger, Skype, iTunes, Google Documents, email, flash games, YouTube, video on demand services, online shopping, web forums, etc, etc.
When I was 14 (I'm now 22) I didn't have a mobile phone, but all my friends did and I was left out quite often because of it.
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Egad, how did students survive at all before Al Gore built the InterWeb?
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At my school at least, the dorms are all on the school network and there is no practical way for students to "get their own bloody network".
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My sophomore year we decided to do exactly this for our cable. (Which sucked). Someone bought a Dish. Around 4 am one night we got onto the balcony and installed it, ran the wires as close to window outlines as we could and had Satellite TV for about 4 months until some Janitor noticed the wire and told our RA.
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www.itunes.com
problem solved
Re:Or... (Score:5, Funny)
And they could hold on to their precious, precious virginity until they're married, stay off those evil reefers and goofballs, turn their darn hippity-hop music down, and get off your lawn.
None of the above will happen in the few remaining years of your lifetime, nor even in theirs.
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So now we're also sharing girlfriends? It's not like she's not there when I'm done. Of course I'm none too thrilled about sharing an open-sores girlfriend. You keep her. I think this time it's worth paying for.
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I don't see any "up side" to holding on to that. Look at Dr. McKay on Stargate Atlantis: "saving it" sure didn't help him; he's wound tighter than a watchspring.
Re:Or... (Score:5, Informative)
Or... students could use an academic network for academic purposes only, and get their own bloody network connection if they want to download music? Y'know, just a thought.
I'd honestly like to hear how that is supposed to work when you're living in a dorm room.
When I went to college everything had to go through the school. We paid the school for our cable TV, because outside companies were not allowed to run cables into the dorm rooms. We paid the school for our landline phones, because outside companies were not allowed to run cables into the dorm rooms. And we paid the school for our Internet, because outside companies were not allowed to run cables into the dorm rooms.
I suppose that these days you could probably get a cell phone with a data plan and plug your computer into that... But I doubt it would work very well, either from a cost or performance standpoint.
Additionally you've got a question of where you draw the line between academic purposes and everything else. Is sending an email home to the folks ok? How about emailing your professor? How about emailing another student? What if you're a music student and trying to download something from a P2P network for the sole purpose of writing a report about it?
Colleges are put in the very uncomfortable position of ISP for their residential students. On one side you've got the academic leanings towards free speech and open access... On the other side you've got the same issues ISPs have with providing adequate bandwidth to all their customers...
Exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Colleges are put in the very uncomfortable position of ISP for their residential students.
and they should behave like an ISP and stop filtering crap for unrelated corporate interests.
Just follow the law and provide information if served with proper papers, and let the students *gasp*, make their own choices and take responsibility for them.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Personal responsibility?! Not in the USA. Here everything is someone else's fault. You should sue.
--This message brought to you by the Trial Lawyers of America.
How I would set things up (Score:2)
Maximum speed within the residence halls (to encourage people to grab files, legal or otherwise, from someone else in the residence halls)
Speed to the rest of the university network is capped at whatever speed makes most sense
Traffic within the residence halls and out to the wider university network is 100% free (lecture notes and anything else they need)
Run a university provided mirror server for non-copyright-violating files that are large/popular (e.g. linux ISOs, Microsoft service packs, game updates, f
Colleges may not have that luxury... (Score:3, Informative)
> and they should behave like an ISP and stop filtering crap for unrelated corporate interests.
The RIAA then sponsored a bill trying to get their federal funding cut off if they didn't do something about P2P. That provision was watered down, but they've still been told to, in effect, "do something" about the RIAA's problems.
Whether they want to or not.
Re:Exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
this is not true with universities. They have massive internet throughput, and if they apply DSL speed policies to each residence hall connection, there would be no issue with bandwidth hogs.
As for the other ISP's used in your rationalization, they need to INCREASE.. THEIR... CAPACITY. You don't see any other manufacturer engage in rationing when they reach plant capacity. They add wings to their plant or build a new one.
Not to mention that we have to respond to p2p notices. At our school, we get so many notices that one full-time staffer (at $40k/year salary--with benefits, the cost goes up to around $55-60k/year) devoted to working with issues related to the DMCA. That's not insignificant.
100k a year to censor student lines and deny them the right to civil disobedience (and to face the possible consequences thereof) against abusive corporate interests, or a couple more staff members. Hmm..
Did your university also refuse to provide computer networks because that would require you hire IT staff?
How about sports fields because you'd have to increase grounds keeping budgets?
What makes the MAFIAA so special. Welcome to the real world where costs increase occasionally.
If we didn't discourage p2p using technological means, it may well require more staff, as I assume that the notifications would increase.
Oh NO!! you'd have to do your jobs instead of screwing the students on the MAFIAA's behest!!!
And most of the people who have to do the grunt work of the DMCA enforcement at the university level (again, at least here) really hate every aspect of dealing with it, and really wish that the RIAA/MPAA would just go away.
So instead, you subject your students to the great firewall of china at their behest, inconveniencing them much more (especially wow players) than your staff, who should be doing their jobs. (the jobs people like me paid 30k/yr after aid to do)
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The students could actually buy music. I doubt itunes is blocked.
If they suddenly realize that they cant afford everything they want for zero effort, then they just got a free basic economics lesson.
I bet the college network prevents people running mass-mailing spam businesses from their dorm room too. Is that also a right for every student?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I suggest that you go to Europe and study here instead. You may drink alcohol before you're 21 too! ;)
Please, no more American students lying in puddles of their own vomit in the student bars! Though it is funny to watch.
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>>>a music student trying to download something from a P2P network for the sole purpose of writing a report?
Why can't you just go BUY the music like everybody else? Yeah I know. Shocking concept. But the people behind the music deserve to get paid; not stolen. A music student should understand that concept better than anyone else, since he/she will soon be relying on sales for income too.
Unless the song is something released on-line only.
I'm not suggesting that my scenario is likely, I was simply throwing out examples of why it may be difficult to filter out academic use from personal use.
I said earlier that a simple solution is just to limit connections to 128 kbit/s. It would still allow students to access email, online radio, or class websites, but the slow speed would discourage them from downloading an illegal 50 gigabyte Bluray rip (~40 day transfer time). The imposed speed limit would make the need for university policing very minimal, since P2P theft would be next-to-impossible.
Fair enough. And that's actually what my school did at the time. The dorms had a very small amount of bandwidth available to them. You could surf the web ok, do email ok, play some games ok... But big download basically didn't happen.
Of course that caused some trouble for the Computer Science departmen
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Surely you just get mobile broadband via a USB modem stick? I can get one which runs at upto 7.2Mb/sec for $15/month (equivalent USD cost after rebates), with a 5Gb usage limit.
Not sure if that kind of service has reached much of the US yet.
Dunno. I've since moved on and have a crappy residential cable ISP. I've got a work-provided cell phone that doesn't get Internet at all. I'm sure such things are available, though I have no idea what they cost or how well they work.
Same is true of lots of educational spending (Score:2)
This is no different to a whole range of things schools and universities have to spend money on because some of their students act like idiots.
Some idiots bring knives to school, so the school has to waste money on metal detectors.
Some idiots will send spam and viruses to any PC connected to the net, so the schools have to spend money on spam filtering and firewalls.
In these cases, we all realize the maniacs with knives or the bastards who send spam are the ones causing the school to have to deal with this
$100K is more than the sales of product... (Score:2)
$100K+ per college per year is more money than the sales of recorded product to the students would generate. Therefore the RIAA is getting paid twice: once through extortion ("we won't sue you for promoting piracy through providing high bandwidth...") and again through product sales to the students.
No wonder they want the current situation to continue.
The only real 'solution' is to convince students to wean themselves from RIAA/MPAA product. This will probably prove next to i
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Apparently you missed the part where they are paying for it either way, by having part of their tuition go toward protecting the RIAA and MPAA.
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Oh, and while they're at it, they should *totally* cache youtube, magnatune, pandora, and every legal torrent!
Get over it; just because it *can* be used for evil doesn't mean it's bad. Technology is neither good nor bad. It's the use.
Step 3... (Score:4, Funny)
1) Scare congress into passing tough new regulations on colleges.
2) Get colleges to pay for your copyright enforcement.
3) Profit! Maybe...
The problem is that even after you do all this, do you actually make more money?
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The problem is that even after you do all this, do you actually make more money?
When the [MP|RI]AA make the Network Appliances being Licensed [audiblemagic.com]
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Numbers are fun (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Numbers are fun (Score:5, Insightful)
No, this $100,000 is likely coming out of small campus programs who are lucky to have a budget. If it's being routed out of the overall tech budget, chances are that's the computer lab upgrade budget or other small, but needed programs that could really use that money. Seems a shame that money isn't being used better.
Re:Numbers are fun (Score:5, Insightful)
My wife has worked for more than one University and let me tell you that the waste across the board is horrendous. This is just a drop in the bucket but yet another example of short sighted wasteful spending. Meanwhile, tuition continues to go up at a rate that greatly outpaces core inflation.
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There's waste every time you put a bunch of people in one place, and a university is no different. $100,000 is about two people's salary's (staff members) and the idea is to allow the real work to be done on campus -- it's painful for researchers to download GB-sized data sets for their models in the first place, never mind having their throughput clogged by the latest WoW patch or Hollywood "blockbuster" download.
At our University the dorms are on a different VLAN and it's just throttled to save room for
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Tuition can continue to climb so quickly with nary a peep from anyone because so much of it is paid for through student loans, which are basically like free money to the students who get them. They only really pay attention to how much money it is when it comes time to repay it after they've already graduated.
Couple that with the idea that a more expensive school is widely seen as a "better" school, and there's really very little motivation to keep tuition down.
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No. $100K is still $100K whether it's 10% of $1M or 0.1% of $100M.
That $100K/yr will pay for tuition for how many students? 2 or 3 in proper subjects? (What are US tuition rates, anyway?) IMO, that's much more worth having than some warm body propping up Britney Spears's bottom line.
And if this is "many" colleges, that's a lot of kids who could get college scholarship, who aren't.
Are the US taxpayers happy to have their education tax dollars being spent on this, instead of on educating additional students?
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100k would be the tuition for about 1-5 students for private schools that don't receive public money.
I would prefer my children (if I ever have the unfortunate joy of having children) to go to a college with lower classroom sizes (lower enrollment), as this will ensure that it will allow my children more time to get 1 on 1 coaching from professors if they need it.
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Fiar comment. So, instead of prioritising 1-5 extra students, you get 1 extra teaching/clerical assistant to help the kids who are already there, or to free up the prof to do so. That's also good use of $100K.
Bullshit (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry, I don't believe this. I do the exact same thing for large networks and it doesn't cost anywhere near that much, what I think they did was *any* software or hardware which was used in the process was added to the total cost.
Ordinary IDS/IPS which just happens to also be used to detect/stop P2P? Add full cost of the solution.
These stats are shady.
P2P != Music (Score:2)
I would agree that a University could simply subscribe to a service like Ruckus to tempt students away from using P2P. But then what about movies? What about Software?
Corporations with interest in those pieces of IP will still have a complaint. Maybe from a risk P.O.V 100k is cheap. I don't know. I'm not a friggin ichioligist or whatever thinks about profit v. risk.
Oh, what about legitimate P2P uses? I guess screw them. No one has to fear abusing or losing legitimacy.
Or they could... (Score:2)
I would agree that a University could simply subscribe to a service like Ruckus to tempt students away from using P2P. But then what about movies? What about Software?
Corporations with interest in those pieces of IP will still have a complaint. Maybe from a risk P.O.V 100k is cheap. I don't know. I'm not a friggin ichioligist or whatever thinks about profit v. risk.
Oh, what about legitimate P2P uses? I guess screw them. No one has to fear abusing or losing legitimacy.
Or they could give people the right to exercise their own moral prerogatives. I mean, it's not as if universities should be open bastions of free thought, or anything.
Explain to me why anyone should pay housing fees just to be censored by completely unrelated corporate interests.
If they want to sue students, hand over the information under the DMCA, and no more liability exists. Simple really.
This crap takes "in loco parentis" too far.
My university is pro/antibittorrent (Score:5, Funny)
Pennies in Legal Compliance (Score:3, Insightful)
Reality check: this is peanuts.
How much does the university pay for all kinds of other legal compliance? How many lawyers on staff?
There's no doubt this is a ridiculous compliance issue. But the average slashdot reader continues to buy new DVD's and pay absurd monthly video content fees that directly support the RIAA. Dog forbid I mention watching less television or consuming fewer media conglomerate products.
Re:Pennies in Legal Compliance (Score:5, Insightful)
the average slashdot reader continues to buy new DVD's and pay absurd monthly video content fees that directly support the RIAA
Those purchases directly support the MPAA. Just as evil, but a different group.
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Reality check: this is peanuts.
How much does the university pay for all kinds of other legal compliance? How many lawyers on staff?
There's no doubt this is a ridiculous compliance issue. But the average slashdot reader continues to buy new DVD's and pay absurd monthly video content fees that directly support the RIAA. Dog forbid I mention watching less television or consuming fewer media conglomerate products.
Please explain to me why, then, they can't put one of their retained lawyers on p2p notice compliance, and NOT spend 100k removing student's right to their own free will on the internet?
Who the hell needs P2P... (Score:2, Interesting)
Went into the campus computer lab to find that the entire room was sitting on live IPs. No NAT, and when I shut off the XP firewall, I was able to ping the machine from the Internet. Naturally, I was logged in with local admin rights.
Fire up Apache and plug in your external HD chock full o' goodies and away you go...
Speed tests showed 80Mb down and 90Mb up. Yes, life must be nice sitting on a phat backbone with a class-B to waste. And we have to wonder why we're running out of IPv4 space?
misleading... (Score:5, Informative)
It's a bit misleading in my experience.
I would say that the services and equipment which are used to fight or support or enforce P2P issues are easily at the $100k level in larger universities.
However, the equipment and services are also used for other purposes such as regulating bandwidth usage, fighting viruses and worms, and limiting network access to only members of the University community.
That's only 1 FTE (Score:5, Insightful)
On that basis it's hard to see how they could do a proper job for less.
Re:That's only 1 FTE (Score:5, Insightful)
The question is not whether they could do a proper job for less. The question is whether they should be doing this job at all.
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good point. Maybe they should stop spam filtering and firewalls, and fuck it, stop campus security and metal detectors too.
If students want to go on killing sprees or run a spam network from their dorm, thats up to them.
Thats FREEDOM!!!11
Yay!
Re: (Score:2)
Well yes, I would not expect them to run firewalls. I mean, my ISP doesn't run firewalls on my connection, and I would get extremely upset if they did. My ISP also does not police P2P traffic based on illegal content. To the extent that they police traffic, whether P2P, spam, or other stuff, it's to reduce the impact on their network. I would not expect this to be any different just because your ISP is also your university.
My ISP also does not protect from killing sprees. Enforcing the law is the job of the
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professors costs $500K (Score:3, Interesting)
Only 100,000 a year? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
In as much as I suspect that few here will want to hear your opinion (modding should indicate whether I'm right about that), I was hoping to find something along those lines.
My first thought when I read the headline was "big deal". When you consider the cost of a private education, $100k at a private institution is trivial. The government takes that much from me every year, and I figure the same people up in arms about the P2P cost wouldn't shed a single tear over my tax bill. Although at least the institut
The scary thing .. (Score:2)
The scary thing is that the **AA would probably offer to police their networks for free, and recoup their costs via lawsuits.
Chop off students' hands (Score:4, Funny)
Seriously, you want ruthless compliance then mutilate people who violate it. And while we're at it let's execute pornographers in the town square. In fact let's make all crimes capital crimes. What about all the GOOD things they do in North Korea?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I see.
so if a student gets fined for breaking the law, that's evil mutilation?
But if you steal someone else's hard work and put them out of business, that's your fucking right?
Grow up.
So ... (Score:2)
They are hiring either up to two warm bodies per school to deal with P2P rules enforcement? This is assuming a school that pays one guy $100k/year, or two guys for $50k/year. Hell, make it three, the manager for $50K, two worker bees for $25K.
I graduated more than a decade ago, and my campus had about 10,000 students. Even back then two people would not be able to do jack squat. Two guys could maybe handle this kind of gig at a faculty level, but campus wide?
Easy Math (Score:2, Funny)
Just enroll 2.5 more students and you'll have an extra 100K
The candidates reply to your concerns! (Score:2)
John McCain explains: "I'd hate to see young college students go astray when there is so much to look forward to. Let's try to keep a level head and co-op these human resources with other areas of the campus IT departments. It won't be as wasteful and everyone wins in the end."
Both sides agree that this is money well spent and with
Equivalent to how many students? (Score:2)
I haven't been keeping up on tuition rates, but the summary specifically states "private universities." When I was college-age (mid-to-late 90s), private university cost approximately $25,000, including room and board. So, this would be the equivalent of 4 students out of their entire student body.
I *think* current rates are closer to $40,000 per year. So, this is 2.5 students (would hate to be that .5 guy).
So, for an individual, this is quite a bit of money. But, for a large organization with prett
Real problem is absurdity (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, we are, but have to think about 2010. (Score:2)
You Repugs are going to lose, and lose big. Butch up and deal with it, kid.
Am dealing with it. Thinking about 2010. Have a lot to do by then. This is but one part of a new global economic vision to deal with the Democrats reactionary socialism.