With the amount of RIAA lawsuits targeted at university and college students, it is quite clear that students account for a good bulk of uploader's when it comes to file sharing networks. When the former Napster started off, it was a very successful file sharing network for exchanging music back around 1999 to 2000, however due to its central based server operation, the RIAA succeeded in shutting it down late 2001. The introduction of decentralised networks made the network immune to the shutting down of the company behind it, which effective forced the RIAA to start suing the individual file-sharers from around mid 2003.
Despite the initial success in suing file-sharers, according to statistics by Big Champaign, a firm that tracks P2P usage, file sharing is rapidly on the rise. For the RIAA to sue an individual, they need to find an individual sharing a substantial amount of music, download samples to check the content and subpoena the ISP of the user with their IP address to get their contact details to place a suit.
When the MPAA and RIAA started targeting students, the students began
resorting to a new file sharing technique where they only share via the LAN with other students using DC++ (DirectConnect) and other internal LAN based file exchanging methods. With several thousand students on a typical campus, a LAN based file sharing network can easily contain a substantial amount of music, movies and other content, which the RIAA and MPAA cannot control, never mind monitor! So to try & tackle this issue, both are busy sending letters to universities addressing the issue and are asking the administrators to monitor and tackle the situation to stop piracy on the campus network. For example, the letters suggest implementing blocking & filtering software. Unfortunately for the entertainment industries, in the past universities have been reluctant to take on these measures, unless threatened with legal action or wish to tackle network bandwidth issues. Thanks to RTV71 for letting us know about the following news:
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Knowing this, college and university students are practically immune from RIAA or MPAA lawsuits as long as they share within the confines of the campus network. Considering many universities contain many thousands or tens of thousands of individuals, finding the files he or she wants is typically not a problem. The situation is raising concerns within the RIAA and MPAA ranks, as they are impotent to deter this unauthorized file-sharing. In fact, the situation is becoming so rampant both organizations have taken the unusual step of issuing joint press releases on the issue. Additionally, the two trade organizations sent 40 letters to as many universities in 25 states addressing the issue. The letters explained the extent of the problem and what campus administrators can do to resolve the issue. |
While the MPAA and RIAA are troubled with the inability to monitor or control campus LAN based file sharing networks, they should at least be happy that the majority of this content is not being made publicly available over the Internet. Also, they should realise that students are just as likely to exchange CD and DVD copies of movies, just as they are doing so over the network, which means that even if the administrators were able to successfully block the exchanging of copyrighted content over the internal network, students will simply go back to physically exchanging content. On the other hand, while a LAN based network may seem small with a few thousand users at most online in a large campus, it only takes a couple of seconds to exchange a full album and few minutes to exchange full movies between peers, so it does not take long to build up a substantial library in a P2P network within the campus itself.
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Source: Slyck News
