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USC students are a bunch of pirates - RIAA
Author: Tim SmalleyPublished: 29th January 2007
According to the RIAA, the University of South Carolina has rather serious piracy problems.
The RIAA sent the institution over 900 copyright infringement notices over the course of the last year. Comparatively, the next highest number of notices received by a college in South Carolina was Clemson, which received only 71 notices in the last year.
It's reported that USC is in talks with the RIAA, discussing changes that it can make to its technology policies. These could include notices to students about illegal file sharing, stricter file sharing limits and university payment to a legal file sharing service that students at USC can use.
"We are 100% committed to obeying the letter and spirity of the law, but we can't be the network police all the time," said Bill Hogue, USC's Chief Information Officer. He claimed that "Trying to police [over 900 infringements] is expensive, time consuming, and the rules keep changing."
"We target the illegal activity, not individual student populations. It's as simple as that," stated an RIAA spokeswoman. The spokeswoman declined to comment on whether USC received the highest number of infringement notices in the US, but she did say that the university was among those who had received the most.
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But I listen to the songs in my head! I'm a pirate! They're going to steal my brainzzzz.
Told you the MPAA/RIAA were zombies.
But isnt that taking it too far?
Sam
They think USC is bad, they should come to Eton!
There used to be something called simply 'The Network' which was a 1Tb Data Server that was basically filled with all the pron, games, movies, music ect. that you could ever dream of. However, that 'supposedly' **cough, cough** got shut down the year before I came.
We have hardware monitoring every piece of traffic sent, and it can be traced back to the machine that the requests came from (mac filtering, dns resolution etc...).
Now unless USC have a similar setup, which I'm assuming they don't, it will be next to impossible for them to target and punish individual students.
Can anyone in an American University just bring a wireless laptop and connect anonymously, is there is some sort of network authentication procedure?
If it's the former then I'm surprised it's this low.
Although the whole network's been really flaky since we got back from Xmas break. I think that's unrelated though, even if it does seem worse when I have my bit-torrent client of choice open. I mean, those 200+ tracked GBs didn't seed themselves, did they?
please hear what they forced MS to do to vista and come and say that again.
edit:
a little off-topic: http://mafiaa.org/
Clemson has its fair share of piracy, however most of the students use 'on-campus' alternatives as opposed to bit-torrent, and p2p networks. This keeps the RIAA involvement to a minimum on our side.
Apparently our rivals dont know this :)
Edit
There would be a constant stream of people collecting there work from the many printers in the college, haha.
Sam
The above is a nice trick, but it wouldn't get past our systems :)
we have an on campus network that holds movies, tv shows, music, programs and more, but it can only be accessed from the campus network. once you are hand approved with university email.
i also torrent on my own for what i want that i usually then add to the general good server. port 80 is the only decent one to use with the rest of the internet traffic. upload speeds very between 400k and 1.6 megs.
other programs like mytunesredux and limewire are also used rabidly.
the wireless network is secured. during the first few weeks you must login with university assigned id name and pass word. during other times you have to have the wep key (which is widely known through the computer savy of campus) and then also log in and validate and take an oath sign over your children and such...
therefore, although you would know a certain student is using x bandwidth, its all encrypted - and through 1 port so you wouldn't know what it is
Indeed, the power to abuse exists everywhere, and yet we experience little abuse of it using that power. Conversely, in certain other first world countries(one in particular) the power to abuse isn't nearly so pervasive, and yet the abuse is far more common and widespread.
You would have a hard time convincing a lot of people that filesharing IS unethical. The **AAs would have yu believe that any time you're not paying them for each time you listen to the music you paid for, you're breaking the law and comitting a carndinal sin, etc etc. My belief is that sharing for private use is not wrong, regardless of what the law may say. Unless someone is trying to sell copyrighted material, then I have no problem with it.
I mean, if everybody got their music free there'd be no commercial music.
My statement was a response was to: "Here anything is up for grabs. Music, Videos, Programs, just about anything that can be put on a computer." While I agree that the **aa are going to far I'm sure it's not ethical to pirate "just about anything that can be put on a computer".
Edit: started my post, left the computer, finished my post & posted it only to see that others have made the point and perhaps better than I did ;)
Oh? I seem to remember the **AAs yelling about how "home taping is killing music". And now, as then, I hear the **AAs screaming about piracy, but in general not the bands themselves. Thye don't make their money on selling music but rather on the live performances. No one is going to not go to a show because they downloaded the CD, but it is very possible that they will go to see a band they downloaded but would never have paid for a CD from. As I see it, pirating is good for bands, but bad for the **AAs, and I don't feel one bit bad about that.
Perhaps you're right, and to that I say "So what?". There will always be music, as long as there are people who enjoy making music and people who enjoy listening to it. Originally music was marketed by word of mouth, then bands started marketing themselves with paper leaflets after the printing press was finally invented. People would pay to see bands that were good and musicians made a living playing. This was not commercial music as we lknow it today. It wasn't until the advent of the vinyl recod that a formal distribution system becam necessary and I would argue that was the birth of commercial music. As an industry it was necessary to distribute and promote music across a broader ausience than the artists could do themselves.
The internet has made the distribution function of commercial music largely obselete. Now any band can record an album and promote themselves globally from their basement. There is still a need for boking agents to arrainge shows, but that is only a byproduct of commercial music.
I guess my point is that filesharing may well be the death of commercial music, but can't see that as a bad thing.
However, i do believe if the industry's (game, music & film) changed the way they treat their users, perhaps piracy levels would fall
I mean, why should i go buy BF2142 for full price, while EA earn money off the Ad's, why should i buy WoW and then have to pay a monthly sub
Make a choice guys, its one or the other, you cant have your cake and eat it and expect users to roll over
The death of the music industry as we know it would have to be somewhat planned or the cure might be worse than the disease.
Linux Rocks, Windoze Sucks
http://www.ijigg.com/songs/770EAPAG
Just ban CD`s all toghether and lets go back on Vinyl.
Makes Copying harder :D