Recently, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America sent letters to 40 university leaders indicating that movie and music piracy had been detected on their local area networks.
The letters also recommended ways for system administrators to cut back on local area network piracy.
The RIAA and the MPAA would not release the universities’ names, and although the RIAA filed a lawsuit against a Pitt student in October 2005 and linked 16 Pitt accounts to file-sharing activities in April 2005, Pitt’s Associate General Counsel Ted Fritz said he did not believe Pitt received a letter.
Local area networks, or LANs, are computer networks connecting many computers in a given area to one another. According to the MPAA and RIAA, LANs allow college students to illegally download movies and music from one another without accessing the public Internet.
Programs like iTunes offer students the chance to listen to other people’s music as long as they’re on the same network. Piracy programs such as MyTunes or OurTunes allow the user to download songs from other computers.
I've been interested in P2P since the early, high-flying days of Napster and KaZaA. I believe that analog copyright laws are ill-suited to the digital age, and that art and culture shouldn't be subject to the whims of international entertainment industry conglomerates. Twitter | Google Plus
