Re: classifying P2P traffic - what about legit uses?

[Tracy Mitrano <tbm3 () CORNELL EDU>]

Our first time offenders with no previous Judicial Administrative
record are directed to a Copyright Education Course, the demo of
which is linked from this page:  http://www.cit.cornell.edu/policy/
It is less a wagging finger than it is an attempt at an understanding
of the tensions among social norms, Internet technologies (file
sharing functionalities in particular), the law and traditional
distribution models of entertainment companies.  The core curriculum
of the program may be found here:  http://www.cit.cornell.edu/policy/
copyright/primer.html

This discussion raises some very interesting questions about which we
could all benefit from hearing and discussing more.  For example: how
do the content owners generate DMCA notices technologically?   What
is the relationship between security and other policy related
functions in an IT shop?  What other areas of our institutions that
might do well to assist in addressing this issue of copyright
education, student affairs for example?  Finally, how do we align
optimal network operations with our institutions' missions?

Good discussion!


On Jan 29, 2008, at 5:56 PM, Curt Wilson wrote:

> I concur with most of Randy's points, however our attempts at
> blocking potentially copyrighted contents and letting "safe"
> contents pass through was met with failure and many takedown
> notices. We could potentially try again, but many other priorities
> exist.
>
> Our campus was experiencing bandwidth issues, and a deluge of RIAA/
> MPAA takedown notices (especially wrt areswarez) and have a small
> staff handling many other issues. Technical solutions to block P2P
> were instituted with significant success. We've had to utilize
> several techniques to provide for decent coverage, and it's still
> not completely foolproof. The opportunity for exceptions is less
> than ideal, however that option does exist. In every case so far
> the user has been able to obtain the contents through other means
> (such as http). Bandwidth is a lot cleaner, and we are less clogged
> up with notices and takedown bureaucracy.
>
> How do other .edus handle their takedown processes? I believe that
> the IT Security role in such a process should be minimal - collect
> the relevant logs for another campus area and let them handle the
> bureaucracy components of the situation. But that's not how things
> are currently executed here.
>
>
> Randy Marchany wrote:
> > Having lurked on this and other related threads over the past
> > couple of months, I'd like to ask a few questions and make a few
> > observations about how EDUs appear to be dealing with P2P.
> > 1. With all of the "monitoring" and "rate limiting" strategies,
> > how does your institution deal with legit uses of P2P? We're a
> > land grant and our extension division may use P2P to distribute
> > videos/sound recordings of their products to extension agents
> > around the state.  Obviously, blocking all P2P would prevent them
> > from doing their business. Music students working on projects and
> > putting their "product" on the net for download (legit because
> > permission was given to distribute) is another example.
> > 2. How many BitTorrent servers or other P2P servers are on your
> > campus nets? What type of scanning or metrics do you collect about
> > p2p traffic? The usual suspects like excessive traffic to/from IP
> > address is nice but what do you do to keep tabs on "normal" P2P
> > traffic?
> > 3. An observation: I'm a security type and a musician. I've always
> > thought that banning P2P traffic because of the potential
> > "copyright" problems was like banning the US Postal Service
> > (Fedex, UPS) because someone xeroxed a book and use them to mail
> > the book. I don't buy the volume issue (it's much faster using P2P
> > than USPS....duh!) because that's a smoke screen. The real issue
> > is making sure users understand copyright issues and know what the
> > potential penalties are.  There are legit uses of P2P in our world
> > and I don't see forcing users to jump through hoops to do real
> > work as being an effective practice. If it's too cumbersome,
> > they'll circumvent it. Having IPS rulesets blocks the casual user
> > but not the determined user. I can remember not being able to
> > download tunes from our band www site because of an arbitrary
> > block while visiting an EDU. Never mind that it was legal (we, the
> > copyright owners, give permission to distribute freely). The block
> > prevented a legit use of P2P.
> > 4. Another observation: are we taking the easy way by arbitrarily
> > blocking P2P because a) we're short staffed b) we're lazy c) we
> > don't have resources for user education d) we don't have upper mgt
> > support d) we're afraid of the RIAA/MPAA e) all of the above?
> > Shouldn't we be investing more in the short term (policy
> > enforcement, user education, categorizing P2P traffic to id the
> > illegal stuff)? This short term effort would eliminate a good
> > chunk of the longer term problem.
> > Just my .01 worth.
> >         -Randy Marchany
> >         VA Tech IT Security Office
> >         



Tracy Mitrano
Director of IT Policy
110F East Hill Office Bldg
Ithaca NY 14853
(607)254-3584