Re: DMCA

[John Ladwig <John.Ladwig () SO MNSCU EDU>]

One additional nuance to "blocking" P2P via certain technological means is worth mentioning.

Our rateshapers  have separate policy subclasses for tracker traffic and transfer traffic, for P2P protocols like 
Bittorrent.  If you shape the superclass of Bittorrent down to an unusable level (say, 10kbps), that's still quite 
enough for the content owners' hired guns to determine that someone on your network is "making available" material 
which the hired guns believe to be copyrighted.

As such, it seems possible to make Bittorrent unusable, and recapture bandwidth, and still not reduce your DMCA notice 
volume at all.  From what I can tell, the hired guns don't even *attempt* transfers, but instead rely on offer 
advertisements as the basis for their takedown notices.

   -jml

-----Original Message-----
From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Tim Doty
Sent: Wednesday, 30 November, 2011 11:11
To: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv; John Ladwig
Subject: Re: [SECURITY] DMCA

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