Posted on 12/02/2011 11:28:02 AM PST by skeptoid
The groan is almost audible coming from dormitory rooms at UAA.
The university is intentionally slowing the speed of Internet connections in all on- campus dorm rooms to prevent students from infringing on copyrights when downloading movies, music and videos, a move first reported by UAA's student newspaper, The Northern Light.
(Excerpt) Read more at adn.com ...
Not all that unusual. We do the same sort of thing at the college where I work. It’s all about walking that line. You can’t block everything because some might be legal or legitimate. So we throttle things down to a speed that is completely unacceptable for the casual downloader. Students can’t complain that we are blocking them and the copyright lawyers can’t complain that we aren’t doing something prevent the piracy.
“So for example, anyone using Bittorrent would have reduced speeds while anyone surfing the net, watching Youtube, playing online games, etc. wouldn’t notice any reduction in speed.”
That’s what they will do because they don’t want to adversely affect the other so-called “legitimate” usage. A VPN tunneled through SSH, for example, can circumvent a Bittorrent throttle. Some of them will still get the throughput they need that way for their torrents and the download traffic won’t implicate the school.
Meanwhile, YouTube is a virtual jukebox, any song you can think of is pretty much out there.
I'm reminded of those days on a daily basis at F.R.
I have cable internet and lightening fast speeds everywhere except here. (And, yes, I'm already a monthly donor.)
Meanwhile, they’re punishing everybody, including those who know pirated software, music and movies is illegal. This is exactly what net neutrality entails, which I am totally against.
I love this one kid’s comment (whine) at the website:
I’ve got a better way to deal with piracy at UAA: Ignore it. It doesn’t hurt anyone. Study after study have shown that it doesn’t harm the income of the artists who create digital content, and some musicians vocally support piracy of their own work. Digital piracy is not morally comparable to stealing — the real wrong in actual stealing is that, when you steal something from someone, they don’t have it anymore. Piracy is just making a copy for yourself. This anti-piracy crusade is really about supporting a cottage industry of worthless lawyers who want to squeeze money out of cash-strapped students and universities and give it to themselves and the record labels. They’re worthless, money-grubbing middlemen. It’s insane for UAA to restrict everyone’s technology in order to feed that scam.
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