05-09-2003, 09:29 AM
Something I saw tonight caught my eye after the music piracy thread here. I think one of the major reasons that media piracy is so widespread is that the law is not much deterrent. Of those amongst us who have ever copied something illegally, who really expects to get busted for it? It's not like the cops are going to barge in and seize your computer, right? Well, that's exactly what happened to some college kids across the street from me.
According to The Lantern, a student newspaper at The Ohio State University, university police raided dorm rooms Monday and seized a few kids' computers, DVD players, and various media. Their crime? Running a peer-to-peer filesharing server. They have not been arrested or formally charged with anything. Any charges will hinge on the illegal transfer of copyrighted material, but the reality is that these kids got busted for being bandwidth hogs. They were apparently consuming some 10% of the bandwidth available to thousands of college students, and some network admin decided enough was enough. Of course, those thousands of college students were the ones who were using this server to share files.
Perhaps this is too mundane to merit discussion. It's a remarkable story to me, because not so many years ago I was living in those dorms and sharing a fair number of files (both legally and illegally) myself. Back then, it was simply a matter of looking at the list of computers on the LAN and picking one to browse. At any rate, the thought of University Police raiding a room full of computer science nerds in the engineering dorm and taking their computers is downright bonechilling! Aren't there provisions against cruel and unusual punishment? :)
According to The Lantern, a student newspaper at The Ohio State University, university police raided dorm rooms Monday and seized a few kids' computers, DVD players, and various media. Their crime? Running a peer-to-peer filesharing server. They have not been arrested or formally charged with anything. Any charges will hinge on the illegal transfer of copyrighted material, but the reality is that these kids got busted for being bandwidth hogs. They were apparently consuming some 10% of the bandwidth available to thousands of college students, and some network admin decided enough was enough. Of course, those thousands of college students were the ones who were using this server to share files.
Perhaps this is too mundane to merit discussion. It's a remarkable story to me, because not so many years ago I was living in those dorms and sharing a fair number of files (both legally and illegally) myself. Back then, it was simply a matter of looking at the list of computers on the LAN and picking one to browse. At any rate, the thought of University Police raiding a room full of computer science nerds in the engineering dorm and taking their computers is downright bonechilling! Aren't there provisions against cruel and unusual punishment? :)