Sent out letters to the top 25 “pirate universities” offering them software to help “identify and categorize” the traffic on their networks.
The MPAA recently sent letters to the presidents of schools it claims are among the top 25 for movie piracy occurring on their networks. In it the MPAA stresses that a “significant level of online piracy is taking place via university networks,” and that steps must be taken to curb it (It conveniently leaves out mention of last year’s record-breaking profits of course).
It goes on to announce the offering of the University Toolkit as an application schools can use to illustrate the level of file-sharing on each of their networks. “It is designed to be user friendly and require as little time as possible to run and collect meaningful information,” the letter reads. “The program cannot distinguish between legal and illegal activity and does not identify the titles of the files being passed across the network.”
Among other things it promises the following:
- Creates a simple graphical report on the extent of file sharing occurring within the campus network.
- The University toolkit does not identify infringements.
- No privacy issues – the content of traffic is never examined or displayed.
- It does not communicate results to the MPAA.
- Requires minimal effort from IT staff..
- Access to NTop and Snort data for detailed analysis..
However, as the Washington Post points out, some of these promises by the MPAA are fairly misleading.
For example, it claims that it doesn’t communicate with the MPAA. But, the very first thing the University Toolkit does is connect with the MPAA’s servers and check for any updates, thus telling them every IP address that’s running it.
It also claims that “the content of traffic is never examined or displayed.” This too isn’t the full story because it creates a Web server that “…automatically configures all of the data and graphs gathered about activity on the local network to be displayed on a Web page, complete with ntop-generated graphics showing not only bandwidth usage generated by each user on the network, but also the Internet address of every Web site each user has visited.”
Without proper firewall protections in place the Web server can be accessed from outside the university, and presumably the MPAA if it so desires. Now Craig Winter, the MPAA’s deputy director for Internet enforcement, said the toolkit is currently a beta version and that the MPAA is considering making it mandatory for administrators to guard access with a username and password, but it seems that “considering” is the operative word here.
He also mentions that future versions may prompt users for permission to check for updates on startup.
Winter emphasized several times that the toolkit was not designed to determine whether someone is infringing on copyrights. “It can tell you how much traffic is going back and forth on BitTorrent, but it can’t see what’s in those files or what the names of those files are, and it doesn’t communicate anything back to the Internet.”
“It’s certainly not a tool intended for us to come and inspect [university networks] without permission,” Winter said. “We wanted to make this as easy to use as possible, to accommodate system administrators who might want to go back to their dorm and monitor it remotely.”
I think it’s ludicrous for any self respecting university to allow the MPAA to be a part of network monitoring, no matter how independent or anonymous they claim it to be.
Looking for more stuff to watch or download?
Democrats: ‘Colleges Must Stop File-Sharers or Lose Federal Aid’
TVLinks Alternatives for Free TV Shows & Movies
Tips on how to not get busted for file-sharing
3 Quick Ways to Watch Movies for FREE!
3 quick ways to watch TV shows for FREE
BitTorrent torrent sites & search engines
uTorrent – A Beginner’s guide to BitTorrent downloading
News Tip? Comment? Suggestion? jared@zeropaid.com
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Sure…It does not communicate any information to the MPAA/RIAA..Riiiiiiiiiiiiight!
“It’s certainly not a tool intended for us to come and inspect [university networks] without permission”
So what the true meaning of that statement is is: It’s really a tool that WILL log the information that we want and need but we’ll only use that info if we have permission of which if you don’t give us that permission we will take you to court and force you to let us look at the logs!
What idiots! A network admin does not need a tool provided by MPAA/RIAA to show a graph of bandwidth usage. There are other free programs that can do that!
Who the hell cares what students are and aren’t doing on the network? Their tuition well covers internet usage.. and it’s not like universities pay by bandwidth consumption. Also no IT admin needs a stupid program from the MPAA/RIAA to see usage. I’m surprised these colleges haven’t told the MPAA and RIAA to blow it out their ass. Besides they have record breaking profits.. why the hell are they worried about people downloading movies and music? Most of the times those people word of mouth it to everyone else besides the people who download it usually won’t buy it anyway. I personally wouldn’t listen to any of the music I do if I had to buy it and couldn’t download or listen on myspace. There are few and far between movies and songs I want to buy. But when they come along I do buy them… even though I know I can download them.
as always they wanna stop the unstopabble and again if they start messing with the isp’s then theres gonna be WAR!!!! everyone is gonna have “their own isp”……….only a possibility
and again they got more traffic in their own computers trying to “find us” than we can imagine………they are trying to make “better” what could get even worse..
my advice would only be to change ports for torrent clients
axlman is correct. Any ITD department worth its existence already can do all this WITHOUT involving any outside intrusion. As a matter of fact it would be downright irresponsible to use this software.
As much complaining that we might do about our ITD Department they are just not this stupid!
Hell I’m and IT Field Tech myself and we use Sonicwall Firewalls in our company Although we do lock down the internet we still log all incoming and outgoing traffic as well as websites visited and what username was used to access the internet!
What’s that logo? It looks like a mechanical squashed knacker. I know what happened…In a future war between man and machine a brave scientist whipped of the googlies of a large ‘bot. Right Rorschach test passed. Extra chocolate pudding after tablets!