According to Inside Higher Ed, one of the provisions of the Higher Education Act, which was passed last August mandates for colleges to police their network for illegally copied copyrighted works. And according with a survey conducted by the Campus Computing Project, this will cost colleges $350,000 to $500,000 a year out-of-pocket to comply.
Colleges are “required to consider the use of technology-based deterrents” to prevent or deter copyright-infringement on peer-to-peer networks. These can include traffic monitoring and packet shaping.
There are a number of problems with this plan:
First, the record labels want the colleges to pay money because some of their students are violating record label copyright. The colleges are stuck in a bad place; because the government has mandated it. It’s highly likely that these measures will be ineffective, but even if they are effective, the copyright infringers will just move off campus and get residential broadband, leaving all the students paying higher tuition and residency bills because the colleges have to pay for the ineffective enforcement somehow.
So, who benefits from this law? The labels? This won’t stop one copyright infringer, and I think they know that. What it does do is pass on the costs of ineffective piracy countermeasures from the labels to the colleges? The colleges don’t get anything – nor do the students, pirates or otherwise.
Nobody benefits, and most people suffer. This is a crappy law.
Additionally, there are significant political and academic freedom issues in requiring a network to monitor the traffic for particular activity. This is especially discouraging when you consider that the rate of false positives is going to be extremely high: there is no traffic monitoring solution that is smart enough to tell whether a particular MP3 file is legal or illegal. Any activity that blocks illegal content can easily break legal ones: fair use of the work, public domain, creative-commons, or downloaded by the copyright holder. (Recently, a smaller record label had its site pulled because it had hosted copyrighted MP3 files – its own.)
So, in short, it’s stupid, ineffective, and has potential unpleasant side effects. How do you best comply with a law that’s so dumb that it borders on ridiculousness?
The only way to fight stupidity is by being clever – find solutions that won’t cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and which do not harm the ability of students, faculty, and alumni to advance the academic mission of the school. For example, enabling and properly using Cisco Netflow information to make intelligent decisions about QoS policies. (Labs and offices get more leeway than student residences, local proxies of popular legal BitTorrent files – like WoW patches and Ubuntu releases – on the LAN.)
Considering that the provisions in the law (and I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and even if I was a lawyer, I probably wouldn’t be a good one anyway) basically amount to: “Do something” about P2P copyright infringement, it’s probably best just to use QoS policies to throttle down (without cutting off) that traffic which looks suspicious. But err on the side of assuming that the use is legal and for the academic mission. Maybe set up a filter that only goes into effect if the protocol is BitTorrent, and the content is a video file, and the seeders and peers aren’t all from IP addresses that correspond to astrophysics laboratories.
You could also make use of anomaly detection software to track spikes in MP3 traffic – that is, of course, assuming that the downloading of music files by the 18-25 demographic is in any way considered “anomalous” rather than “status quo…ulous…” Something like that.
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