I had written about the MP3 copyright problems in a post to ISED-L, the private school mailing list. A trustee of a private school replied to my post with the experiences which they had encountered. It is food for thought, to say the least. My post was : "The copyright infringement issues and the free, open nature of Internet use create so much confusion...The school which does not adopt a firm "anti-stealing" policy concerning music files is going to be a target for litigation IMHO." - Robert Kennedy
Here's what the trustee wrote:
"I agree. Until last summer, our school had a T-1 connection to the net, and an internal LINUX network run by students, with a faculty advisor. Unfortunately, there was no-one on the faculty or administration who understood LINUX, let alone network administration, well enough, so there was no way to know exactly what the students were doing, other than relying on self reporting.
For quite some time, we trusted what the students were saying about who had access to the network, who had e-mail accounts, whether they were abiding by acceptable use policies, and what they were doing on the network. UNTIL we got a letter from an attorney alleging that someone from our domain had been offering bootleg copies of movie trailers for download from our server.
As a result, we immediately had a technologist who knows LINUX investigate what the students had been doing. We found that for days at a time there had been sustained (24 hours a day!) outbound data transmission saturating the full T-1 connection, from our servers. We never did find out exactly what was being served, but our best guess was that most of the traffic involved uploading .MP3, .MOV, .AVI and .JPG files from somewhere, and making them available to the world from the school's server. We immediately changed our network administration set-up so that a staff member is now able to monitor what is being done on the network. Although this involved only a small minority of students, we were very concerned about potential liability, the misuse of our system, and the unfortunate breach of the trust we had placed in our student systems administrators.
Anyway, the kids are really sharp when it comes to knowing about networks, the web, .MP3s, etc. It takes a knowledgeable, full-time sys admin to keep ahead of them. I imagine that's the same at many schools. It'll be interesting to see how it all plays out. I hope a path can be steered between authoritarian control over computing facilities, and unrestricted use that results in problems for the institutions that allowed such freedom."
Regards,
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin, of course, is the nom de plume of the aforementioned trustee.
