Tackling College Piracy: At What Cost?
Written by Ben Jones on October 22, 2008The Higher Education Opportunity (HEO) Act of 2008 requires US universities and colleges to undertake measures to reduce piracy, and go after students who use filesharing networks to share copyrighted files. A recent study found that, per institution, between $350,000 and $500,000 a year is spent tackling the piracy problem.
The methods universities use to reduce piracy on their networks have been scrutinized in our ‘Tackling College Piracy’ series. Most of them have been found to be technologically ineffective, working only at the psychological level. The main problem with the “technological approach” is that it’s impossible to distinguish authorized from unauthorized network traffic. Nonetheless, these anti-piracy efforts are quite expensive.
First of all, the amount of time spent dealing with allegations of infringement are huge, according to the study by the Campus Community Project. IT personnel alone spend a mean time of 750 hours at public universities, while private university IT personnel spend around 620 hours a year on this. The shorter time for private institutions generally comes about because of their smaller size, and so smaller search size, and less frequent notifications.
Overall, the costs that come with them are larger than most would expect. It was concluded that between $350,000 and $500,000 is spent annually per institution – directly and indirectly – dealing with copyright infringement notices. The quality of US education has already been questioned (most recently by US presidential candidate Barack Obama in the 3rd Presidential Debate), especially in contrast to the high cost of it. In this light, the costs incurred dealing with copyright infringements are nonsensical.
The study reports that 25% of public universities use a form of technological filtering, such as Copysense, to try and reduce infringements. As noted before, such measures are fairly inaccurate and rarely work. Less common are educational methods, which may be linked with p2p access, as at Missouri S&T. However, most universities and colleges simply disconnect pirating students from the network, and make them promise to never do it again when they want to get back on. Financial penalties are also given, but this is not yet commonplace. We will deal with this in an upcoming piece.
Previously: ‘Shocking’ 61% of all Upstream Internet Traffic is P2P
Next: How to Bring Dead Torrents Back to Life
33 Responses
just wasting money on ineffective techniques…
What does reducing piracy have to do with improving higher education opportunities? ‘Cause I don’t see the connection. It’s like saying, “How can an ant lift three time its body weight, but root beer floats are still delicious?” Are the two even related?
Also, something called the “Higher Education Opportunity Act” has no reason to deal with and should not be dealing with piracy. In fact, not spending money on stopping piracy leaves more money to go towards education. Why are the people in charge of America so stupid?
My college does not even allow bittorrent/P2P or even XDCC on IRC. Only HTTP downloads work.
Of course people still bring files from home and trade with usb sticks anyway. This is actually faster and safer.
after a while.. the entire world seems like noobs.. even people in charge of our educations system..
noobs teaching noobs.. *sigh*
More proof of when the content industries have their way…. everyone else lose.
History repeating itself?
RIAA = French at Dien Bien Phu… question is not if they lose, but when.
It’s ok, it’s not like Universities are established for the purpose of shareing thought and informat… oh crap…
>More proof of when the content
>industries have their way…. everyone
>else lose.
You dont need a “proof” for that. Its self evident. Those industries are based on what they call “copyright”, which actually means a copy prohibition for everybody else. A prohibition on private sharing/copying is a kind of large-scale for-profit censorship. I dont know any example of forced large-scale censorship where everyone else _didnt_ lose. Its bad by definition, its bad in practice.
@4 I’m kinda starting to feel that too…
@7 lmfao!
Like #7 already pointed out, the text of the intro should actually read:
“The Higher Education Opportunity (HEO) Act of 2008 requires US universities and colleges to undertake measures to reduce sharing, and go after students who use filesharing networks to share.”
After the fascists conquer the universities, they’ll get to primary schools and kindergardens:
“The Primary Education Opportunity (PEO) Act of 2009 requires US kindergardens and primary schools to undertake measures to reduce sharing between students, and eventually go after children who share.”
Sharing and caring is pure stalinism. Copyright censorship is the real freedom. The sooner we beat our children into accepting that simple truth, the less problems will they pose to the society during their education.
If universities were to abandon their existing .org IP range and instead join a common broadband carrier, they’d save a fortune, and their students would be safe from lawsuits, because then the RIAA would have no way to identify universities to be singled out for punishment.
And to think, it is the students themselves that are paying for this through their tuition.
Direct Connect Hubs FTW!!
this really is same old if you think about it..
top executive says OMGZ our stuff is being pirated!!
lower executives say ITS OK WE FIX IT
those executives say OH SHIT.. UHH.. LETS HAMMER THE UNIVERSITIES THERE EASY!
universities get a whole bunch of shit.. they dont wanna f*ckin deal with it.. so there like.. OK HOW CAN WE MAKE THIS PROB GO AWAY?
they buy a big expensive peice of metal, shove it in there network infrastructure.. and now there ‘Doing Something’.
Its not about whats right or wrong.. its about doing something half ass and being able to report back that you did something about the problem.
pass the buck.. because nobody gives a real shit.
Glat they don’t do this i Norway, or else I would have been kicked out a long time ago ^^
1Gbit bandwith ftw!
@14
Yeah, I can actually back this one up, I work for a school district and we are required to block access to certain material (ie… porn, gambling, forums, etc). Like some kid is going to be looking at porn in class, but its w/e. Anyway, most students use, or are aware of, proxies and other methods to get around it. Its nothing new, and tbh we don’t care… As long as our asses are covered.
That $500,000 per institution figure could be better spent on scholarships…
@10
This brings to mind a particular saying from my early school years: “sharing is caring.”
Seriously, the next thing they will do is fine students for reading aloud from a copyrighted book.
Very strange that this is part of any “Higher Education Opportunity” Act when it is, in fact, doing the opposite of its namesake.
Roze
http://www.28chan.org/fs/
Do you realize that if P2P and sharing networks were to allow to flourish without intervention, what kind of world we would eventually have? Heaven on earth. What if we applied P2P network to how we share food? I don’t know how that would happen but there has to be a way. Man, it would be wonderful and in fact, money would not be necessary anymore. Maybe that’s what they are really afraid of. Not only that but the “Elite” would crumble.
They regularly name those bills like “higher education opportunity” act like that for a reason. It’s so when they get up on those podiums, they can say “I signed the Higher Education Opportunity Act” and Joe Schmoe at home will think, “wow, that’s awesome” but he won’t really know what’s in it or that’s it really damaging to the country.
*raises fist in a tabloid-style rage*
What’s wrong with the record companies defending their intellectual property?
If you had made songs and every kid was listening without paying then you would get pretty angry too
Sounds to me like they just need to ACCEPT that fact and find a better place to spend(waste) that money! Surely there are better things it could be used for!
JIff
http://www.online-privacy.cz.tc
@ 23 cannedmeat
#1 I wouldnt make music only for money
#2 You dont just sell people plastic discs and expect to be rich
#3 The record companies are no longer needed, bittorrent takes there place and does a better job then they ever could for 100% free
#4 The record companies choose to no longer compete, and sell out garbage. They make you buy the same things in different formats that you want. They rather ruin your life, sue your grandmother and children, pay off politicians and monopolize the market to rip you off every step of the way. They want the internet policed. They dont want there scam of ‘buy before you try… no refunds’ being destroyed. They dont pay the real artist shit, they basically rape artist for there music, steal there ‘rights’ so they can sell and take 90% of the profit for the next 50 years.
The list goes on and on.
Why dont you do a little research for yourself, your exactly where the industry wants you.. like cattle waiting to consume whatever they slap in front of you.
The price listed is for schools with over 15k students. The cost for smaller schools is more in the area of $50,000 or less.
Another thing that wasn’t mentioned is that many schools have some equipment capable of reducing illegal p2p use, they just to choose not to fully implement them due to previously established policies.
The US Education system quality is fine.
Why do you think people come over seas to go to college in the US.
As I write this, I’m uploading 3.7 MB/s on my p2p.
So my university obviously isn’t stopping me.
Tell me where the figures come from and who did the study. Otherwise I believe nothing of it and assume an extreme bias.
Perhaps the universities should collectively spend their $350-$500K apiece lobbying Congress to keep these things off the books.
Torrenting at college isn’t hard. My college uses one of those filters and has all non-http downloads blocked, but there are ways to get around it, and those that do are the IT guys or were taught by the IT guys.
I was told by a number of IT guys that as long as I don’t clog up the network an keep my speed and usage low, I’ll go under the radar.
besides, there’s no way they can filter rapidshare and megaupload downloads.
@32
…
Filter:
*rapidshare*
*megaupload*
:D!
Obviously proxies might get around that, but most dont allow such high download… Sizes.
http://www.darkfuel.2ksite.com
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