Every year the RIAA and MPAA send tens of thousands of infringement notices to educational institutions, who then forward these to alleged BitTorrent pirates.

How these suspected pirates are then dealt with depends on local policies but usually it involves a visit to the dean’s office and some sort of sanction.

The University of Illinois, however, is taking it a step further by punishing its students the French way.

When copyright holders send a DMCA notice informing the university about unauthorized BitTorrent downloads, the student’s dorm room is immediately cut off from the Internet.

“Students that receive infringement notices have their access to the internet shut off,” the university’s policy explains loud and clear.

“The user is informed of the requirement to meet with a hearing officer and that their access will remain shut down until such a meeting takes place. The hearing officer will meet with the student to discuss the nature of the violation and University policy regarding copyright infringement.”

The hearing officer can then apply a wide range of punitive and educational sanctions after which the student’s Internet access is eventually restored. However, after the third warning the student will never be allowed to access the Internet again in his or her dorm room, ever.

Brian Mertz, the university’s senior security outreach specialist, says that they receive up to 100 copyright infringement notices a month. This includes warnings for both students and staff.

Christine Svoboda is one of the students who was “caught” last year and it took her almost two weeks to get back online after the first warning. She still has no clue what she did wrong.

“To be completely honest with you, I have absolutely no idea what I downloaded. I have uTorrent on my computer but it was never active at school, and I didn’t use the school’s Internet to download anything like that because it was too slow,” Svoboda told The Daily Illini.

This probably doesn’t come as a complete surprise to Mertz, who noted that not all DMCA notices appear to be accurate. The security specialist said that some warnings do not match up with the activity of the IP-address on the given timestamp. However, these warnings are followed-up regardless.

Interestingly, the rigorous copyright policy also applies to staffers. In fact, Mertz explains that one employee was asked to look for another job after several warnings.

“We can’t get into specifics for HR reasons, but we had one faculty member who had repeat violations and they were actually asked to leave the University because it was such an ongoing problem,” Mertz said.

While people should abide by the rules at work and school, it goes quite far when educational institutions are used as Internet police.

The drastic measures at the University of Illinois do not stand in isolation. In 2010 the U.S. Government added a new requirement for colleges and universities to stop illicit file-sharing on their networks.

This legislation puts a defiant school at risk of losing federal funding if it doesn’t do enough to stop illicit file-sharers on its campus. In response, schools across the country have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars installing anti-file-sharing systems on their networks and updating their policies.

Thanks to the new law, the anti-piracy policies at most universities make the upcoming “six strikes” scheme look like kindergarten.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In 2010 the U.S. Government added a new requirement for colleges and universities to stop illicit file-sharing on their networks. This legislation puts a defiant school at risk of losing federal funding if it doesn’t do enough to stop illicit file-sharers on its campus.

Schools across the country responded appropriately to the new rules and some institutions have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars installing anti-file-sharing systems on their networks. However, this doesn’t mean that college piracy has been completely eliminated.

There’s still plenty of unauthorized swapping going on at colleges, even on BitTorrent, which is the most heavily monitored file-sharing platform.

With help from ScanEye, TorrentFreak has obtained a list of the most active U.S. universities on BitTorrent networks this year. ScanEye monitors hundreds of thousands of public torrent files and based on IP-addresses they can track downloaders back to individual universities, when these are listed as the IP-owner.

As can be seen on the table below, Rutgers University leads the list with 1809 “hits” since November last year, almost twice as many as New York University which comes in second place with 986 hits.

University Of Houston, University of Southern California, and Texas A&M University complete the top 5.

To put the “hits” in perspective, a large Internet provider such as Comcast has several million, and even Disney has over a hundred hits. While some students (or staff) still use BitTorrent on the university network, BitTorrent use is certainly not rampant.

As a disclaimer, we have to mention that not all of the files downloaded at these universities are being shared without permission. There is plenty of legal content available on BitTorrent. However, a quick glimpse at the most downloaded content reveals that unauthorized sharing is relatively popular.

At Rutgers University the top 5 most downloaded files comprises the movies Fast Five, Cars 2 and Puss in Boots, the game The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, and the album The Dreamer, The Believer by Common. Typical student downloads such as Microsoft Office for Mac and cult films such as Pulp Fiction are high up the list of most shared files at Rutgers University.

Below is the full list of the top 50 universities ranked by BitTorrent usage.

Update: MIT was not included in the data we received initially, and should be on top of the list below with 2,315 hits.

Update: Here is the ranking of universities based on the student population (Thanks Zac!)

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The world’s largest BitTorrent site has teamed up with the Cybernorms research group at Lund University and is encouraging its users to take a sociological survey on file-sharing related matters.

The group researches how the Internet creates new social norms in society, and to what extent these norms are or should be reflected in relevant legislation. Ultimately, the researchers hope the collated knowledge and insights will help legislators to draft more sensible laws. Needless to say, this is a topic that The Pirate Bay takes to heart.

“The Pirate Bay undertakes this study in cooperation with the research group Cybernorms at the Sociology of Law Department at Lund University in Sweden. Completing this short survey will take only a few minutes of your time, after which you will be redirected to The Pirate Bay,” the introduction of the survey reads.

“Understanding online norms and values is essential to developing relevant and effective laws and policies. The purpose of this survey is to help researchers to better understand habits and norms within the file-sharing community. With your help, we hope to create a knowledge base that will influence new laws and law enforcement related to the internet,” it adds.

The survey itself is pretty straightforward and can literally be answered in under a minute. Due to the nature of the topic, all data will be kept strictly confidential and no personally identifiable information such as IP-addresses will be stored.

TorrentFreak got in touch with Cybernorms head of research Måns Svensson to find out more about the project and the purpose of the project.

“In this survey that we are conducting together with The Pirate Bay we are collecting data that will give us information about file sharing around the world,” he told us.

“We know that recent developments in terms of law and law enforcement in Sweden have weak support in the social norms of society. By conducting a global study among file sharers we will be able to get new information on the situation in other parts of the world.”

“In a broader sense we want to follow and study the social norms that are emerging as a result of new technology and law’s ability to respond to the changes. Our hope is that better knowledge in this area will lead to a more sensible legal development,” Svensson added.

Marcin De Kaminski, PhD candidate in Sociology of Law at Lund University and researcher at the Cybernorms group told TorrentFreak that The Pirate Bay has been a partner from the start but that this is the first time the site’s users are being asked to participate.

“The Pirate Bay is still one of the top hundred largest sites on the Internet. As a researcher, it is a great opportunity to be able to base your work upon this. Especially when you’re trying to target a community which sometimes is hard to grasp,” De Kaminski said.

The Cybernorms group officially started in 2009 and previously made the news when it found that millions of Swedes started to hide their online identity in response to tougher anti-piracy legislation. At the time the researchers found that 10 percent of all Swedes between the age 15 and 25 were taking measures to protect themselves against the increasing online surveillance.

The new survey in collaboration with The Pirate Bay is truly the first of its kind. Although many academics and commercial research outfits have looked into the file-sharing issue, to date, none of them has reached out to such a massive group of BitTorrent users. We encourage all our readers who’ve occasionally shared a file to take part, and we’ll report on the results as soon as they come in.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Copysense works by listening in on ALL network traffic, and looking for data patterns that match signatures, or ‘fingerprints’ loaded on it. If it detects data packets matching one of its signatures, it terminates the connection by sending forged RST packets to both sides of the connection (Comcast anyone?).

Piracy detection services like Copysense are not cheap. Ohio University paid around $60,000 in 2007 for the system, and an additional $15,500 a year for updates and support. For this, they got a network monitoring box, and some questionable results that prompt more questions than answers, but we will discuss these another time.

There are more issues though, a system working in promiscuous mode is also a big security risk. Passwords, and user names, if transmitted unencrypted, are observable, as is any other traffic sent in the clear. When J. Brice Bible, the CIO at Ohio University, took up his post, it was in the wake of data security breaches. Now he has paid tens of thousands of dollars for a box that can potentially cause a similar breach. Of course, potentially any network client can do this, but only on their local network, not the entire university network.

Ohio University seems to be happy with the entertainment industry’s favorite anti-piracy system. Of course, the less skeptical amongst us would think that outgoing head of the WIPO being an alumni is pure coincidence, as is the CEO of Fox News. People with a strong pro-copyright agenda having contact with an early adopter of a technology pushed heavily by the MPAA and RIAA, is something that rose some eyebrows at the TorrentFreak office though.

Regardless, Ohio University claims the program has been a success. Speaking in the student newspaper, Bible said, “It works very well for today, (but) I don’t know if it will work well tomorrow or the next day or the year after. I want to hear from students … I think students should be engaged in this discussion—and faculty, too.”

If you’re a student at Ohio University, or one of the other universities that use Copysense, why not let him know, and get involved.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Initially a mining school, the university, known until the start of the year as University of Missouri,Rolla, is not exactly the largest around. Even though the university has just over 6,000 students, they have not been ignored in the scattergun campaign that is Internet-copyright-enforcement by organizations such as the RIAA.

In a recent press release, however, the university claims to have reduced its influx of notices, and credits it to a new system. This groundbreaking system is a multiple choice test, that students have to get completely correct each time, before being allowed access to filesharing applications. Once the test is ‘aced’ the student is granted 6 hours of p2p access. A student can use no more than 8 six-hour periods (48 hours total) a month.

In theory, this could work, but as more things move to a p2p based distribution model, having the ability to access things only on a timed basis is somewhat shortsighted. The content industries are pushing for this kind of restriction, and might see this as a promising development, but have been quiet on Missouri S&T’s program.

Also, the restriction on what can be seen as ‘mainstream p2p’ could lead to an increase in p2p that is harder to monitor and notice, as students will most likely encrypt their traffic or attempt to access content in ways not restricted. Sites that host files like rapidshare wouldn’t be affected by the time restrictions, and internal dc++ hubs, to share what is transferred in during the 6-hour windows would spring up.

It is also unclear which protocols are counted as p2p for these purposes. Newsgroups, as well as showing a resurgence in popularity for file sharing, are also a valuable tool for information exchange in general (and one sometimes embraced by major content producers. J. Michael Straczynski has been posting regularly to rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated, and Terry Pratchett is a regular on alt.fan.pratchett). However, it’s one potential way to prevent WoW addiction in students.

Requests to the university’s system security analyst, Karl Lutzen, were not answered at the time of publication.

Update 12-08-08:

Karl Lutzen did get in touch with us. He explained how the system worked “All p2p protocols known by the technical controls, plus behavioral matches are all blocked by default. This is the default setting that everyone has and the only way to enable the protocols is to go through the application and pass the quiz.”

He also explained how the system stops computers that are set up to use popular p2p networks on a home connection, suddenly throwing out lots of data when connected to the faster university connection, and acting as a magnet for notices. Also, internal P2P networks seem not to be prohibited. When asked about WoW updates, as an example, he told TorrentFreak “In the case of WoW, there is an automatic HTML fallback, but as players within our network start downloading updates, they end up sharing the updates via P2P locally just fine.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.