P2P take downs costing Colleges Plenty
There is an interesting article on the Chronicle of Higher Education today covering the small but growing back lash against the RIAA anti-P2P campaign at the college IT department level. It does not center on the idea that file sharing can be considered illegal, but the cost of resources at the colleges that get RIAA discovery letters. Cold hard fact, many IT shops are cutting staff, this includes college staff, and adding to the work load will not be helpful here.
On e-mail lists and in interviews, university CIO’s and other information-technology professionals say their mission is getting derailed and staff time is being overloaded by copyright takedown notices, “prelitigation settlement letters,” RIAA-issued subpoenas, lobbying efforts, and panicked students accused of piracy. Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
What is interesting to note though is that the colleges find themselves in trouble because they previously complied and provided information to the RIAA in the past. That past compliance is coming back to haunt them in relationship to the demand on resources and staff that colleges have to make available to hunt down people who are trading music and movies on Bittorrent and other P2P systems.
The University of Washington was able to show that just about any system, including a printer could be caught up in the methods that RIAA and its technical processes uses. Filtering out the noise from real users is part of the problem, and something that college IT staff’s need to also realize. There might be someone screwing around on the network and making the provosts printer look like a Bittorrent node. This paper here shows that it can be done, and people sometimes pull some amazing pranks on college campuses.
That is where the burden comes in, and why the small but growing rebellion centers on the idea of staffing when the college systems are already overloaded. We do not generate a lot of college graduates that want to go into IT, if anything enrollments are way down from the late 1990’s, so the pool is getting smaller, demands of companies are getting bigger, colleges might not have the resources or be able to get the resources, people, money, and support that they need. The problem is that so far colleges have complied, and how find themselves at the “rock hard place” problem.
Prior compliance can’t whine now.
Tags: college, bittorrent, p2p, compliance, riaa, it worker shortage, interesting
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