P2P File Sharing News Comments – RIAA 2006-11-22
Forcing a LowID with a firewall (blocking incoming connections) outside of student control will definitly curb file sharing as students are normally not allowed to host servers and stuff anyway. Blocking outgoing connections on the default ports of common file sharing programs will knock out non-veterans and limit veterans as well as 60-70% of clients on the whole network use default ports and these become unreachable. BitTorrent has more legit uses than pure P2P programs but it cannot function at all on a firewalled / lowID connection though. If you are a student and you want to use P2P on a poorly P2P-secured network but with harsh disciplinary penalties, then you best use an IP blocker and keep it up to date and be conscious of what you’re sharing (dilligence on the incoming folder while donwloading new-release and especially pre-release music and movies mostly) as IP blockers aren’t perfect. Regulating your bandwidth usage on Emule and BitTorrent will help too. Most schools appear to only reactively enforce anti-P2P policies out of liability-fear, so you getting busted often requires a DMCA complaint or you significantly adversely hindering the network for everyone else (shared bandwidth) for them to complain. Many research types are pro-P2P or apethetic (don’t care but positive tendancy) if no plagarism or commercial abuse is involved.
****************************************
Multiple Sclerosis is irrelevant with the RIAA’s system. She may be directly guilty (actual user they successfuly downloaded one or more songs from) or indirectly guilty (person they downloaded one or more songs from was not her but had her IP within 24hrs but she was using P2P also, though maybe not at or near the time of download), or innocent, but that doesn’t matter. It is obvious that the victims are only sometimes guilty and that the guilty (directly, which is rare, or indirectly) are often on the lower end of the computer literacy spectrum, and the subset of handcapped people has a majority overlap with the subset of low-computer litteracy P2P users, hence all the lawsuits on disabled mothers, young childeren, and the deceased.
****************************************
The Article is suggesting that the RIAA is targeting lower income victims so that they can’t fight back because they can’t afford their lawyer. This extort-them-all campaign is definitly meant for fear-tactic propaganda.
****************************************
Looks like the RIAA is trying to put a lid on the reverse-engineering and disclosure of their shady lawsuit practices.
