US Students Kept Away from File Sharing

Back in 2008, Congress passed the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA), which included sections were every school benefiting from federal funds was required not only to notify its students about copyright infringement issues but also to come up with plans to address them.


Now those plans have become reality. On July 1, 2010, the rules went into effect and every college and university was reminded via e-mail by the Department of Education on June 4 about the aforementioned obligations.
Several US schools were prompt to satisfy the demands.
Baylor University, for example, is determined to prevent its students from using p2p (peer-to-peer) networks. As ArsTechnica reports, “A BlueCoat PacketShaper locks down bandwidth to students, and all inbound ports are blocked by the campus firewall to keep "computers from acting as servers or super nodes in peer to peer networks."”
Illinois State has employed a packet shaping device dubbed the Packeteer, built to identify P2P traffic and be restrictive with its available bandwidth to make sure it will not interfere with other, more important uses of the campus network. Besides this, the intrusion prevention system the school uses, was designed to block P2P traffic in both directions at the campus border, though only if it originates from residence and wireless hotspots; apparently, faculty and staff are trustworthy when it comes to using P2P applications in a responsible way.


The examples continue and you can read further at ArsTechnica blog which points out that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) lobbied quite a bit for these measures to be enforced and got away just fine with its secret data on campus piracy being wrong by a factor of three or that college campuses account for relatively little P2P use (the rules do not apply to off-campus students). Members of Congress didn’t seem bothered by these details.