Re: RIAA Strikes B.U. & M.I.T.

[Aaron Read <aread@speakeasy.net>]

At 08:32 PM 7/22/2003, Matthew Osborne wrote:
>On Tue, 22 Jul 2003 16:20:42 Dan Billings wrote:
> > That makes sense.
> >
> > Why don't the schools adopt policies that place
> > limits on the amount of
> > material that can be uploaded or downloaded?
>
>Some schools have done more.  Here at Marist College
>in Poughkeepsie NY, any and *ALL* file sharing over
>the school's network is banned.  School policy is that
>any student caught doing any file sharing whatsoever
>will be dismissed from the college.
>
>                               Matt Osborne
>                               Poughkeepsie, NY

Brandeis, until recently, had its own campus-only version of Napster that 
was freely used by the students.  I think it's been shut down.  The reason 
Brandeis created it was purely practical - they've got more students on 
campus than the network can handle (despite an impressive setup) and they 
were losing 75% of their outgoing pipe to Morpheus, KaZaA, Grokster and the 
like....despite extremely aggressive port blocking and bandwidth throttling 
measures.

At WBRS we are about to (finally) embark on an ambitious multi-year project 
to begin transferring all our CD's (over 15,000) to MP3 form for automation 
purposes.  One key provision was that the ripping stations and the network 
hard drive server/array must be on an indepedent LAN that's not assessable 
to the Brandeis network.  Not we personally mind people grabbing free music 
too much - but it is a legal exposure issue, and it's a real bandwidth 
issue as the whole campus would start trying to get free music off our 
server...clogging it too much for legit use!


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aaron "Bishop" Read             aread@speakeasy.net
FriedBagels Consulting          AOL-IM: readaaron
http://www.friedbagels.com      Boston, MA