Re: DMCA

[Tim Doty <tdoty () MST EDU>]

On Mon, 2011-11-28 at 15:48 -0800, Hudson, Edward wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Polling to see how other campuses are handling DMCA take down notices.
> Ours has risen to a level current process is not working efficiently. 

> Interested to see how other institutions are addressing.

Whatever you do should be based on the needs of the university. Other
places may give ideas, but ultimately it needs to fit your situation.

We block by default and have an automatic exception process. The
blocking is effective, but not 100%. We also have an automated process
that analyzes for heavy P2P file sharing traffic and sends daily notices
to the user if they have not filed an exception. We get very few DMCA
notices and process them by hand. This works for us, but the hardware we
use is not cheap and doesn't handle 10G which is going to be an issue
for us at some point.

If you opt to block P2P be aware that no solution is ever going to be
100%. There is no fundamental reason why http could not be used for P2P
(and some do), and regardless encrypted 443 is pretty much universally
allowed. Disallowing inbound connections is annoying, but a problem P2P
file sharing applications solved a long time ago.

So while blocking may be effective for you, don't count on it
eliminating notices, much less P2P activity. As for ignoring notices...
I'd run that by general counsel. I couldn't see ours ever permitting
that, but yours may have a different opinion.

Tim Doty