Friday, November 23, 2007

RIAA Has Now Targeted 7 Out of 8 Ivy League Schools; Still Gives Harvard a Wide Berth

According to this report in Information Week, the RIAA's latest anti-college round of letters targets 6 out of 8 Ivy League schools, but continues to give Harvard University a wide berth. (Cornell was left out of this round, but had been targeted in September.)

Maybe the other colleges and universities should learn a lesson from this.

Appeasement of bullies doesn't work.

Standing up to bullies does work.


Commentary & discussion:

p2pnet.net
Slashdot
Ars Technica
Spiegel Online (German)
The Consumerist


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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe they just don't want a whole generation of future lawyers growing up to hate them.

Anonymous said...

I would like to suggest that all University and ISP administrators should reduce the retention time of their DHCP/RADIUS logs.

The majority of reasons that an Admin looks at the IP assignment logs is for spam and open relay investigations, NOT the RIAA. These investigations only require the retention of about a week of logs. Here, that is about 100 Mb just for that week, so we just keep the current week, and the prior week and automatically dump the prior logs during log rotation.
Keeping these logs longer make no business sense.

If the logs are rotated out in this manner, when the RIAA and crew come knocking, the answer is easy -- Sorry guys, we have no records available. As far as I know, NO law requires retaining any logs whatsover, and they cannot force you to produce what you do not have.

Albert the Network Admin

Anonymous said...

Albert Anonymous,

Be careful what you assume. TorrentSpy, which isn't even located in the USA and doesn't keep logs at all outside of RAM, was recently ordered by a US Federal Judge to maintain and turn over logs of all visitors to their site based on an MPAA suit. This judge decided that RAM memory logs constitute discoverable evidence. Although not at all in the USA and being covered by EU privacy laws to boot, TS had to respond by blocking access to all USA site visitors. Some judges are going (my opinion) insane in what they are trying to order some sites to do.

I agree, however, that these logs shouldn't be kept any longer than necessary for all publicly stated purposes.

--A#1

Anonymous said...

@A#1:

On the same note, the judge's order was not binding on TorrentSpy in anyway (as you yourself have noted that they are not located in the US at all) and they've decided to block the search feature on US IPs themselves and not out of any court order.

All that case served to do was highlight how little understanding of technology some judges have, as the massive burden in just cost alone that decision really implies on any company that uses computers in its business... not to mention privacy issues.