While students at universities in the US are pressured by the RIAA, Cardiff University citing pressure from increasing numbers of copyright infringement notices, has taken out a blunt instrument and banned it’s students from accessing some of the world’s largest BitTorrent sites, regardless of the legitimate content they contain.
The Information Services department of Cardiff University in the UK has notified 25,000 students of its intention to protect the university from a rising tide of copyright infringement notices due to ‘inappropriate use’ of P2P. It will accomplish this by the wholesale banning of a whole range of BitTorrent search engines and trackers from the university network.
Previously, students using P2P applications Aimster, LimeWire, KaZaA, Mactella, Morpheus, Phex, iMesh, Qtella, Audiogalaxy, SwapNut, NeoModus, XoLoX , BitTorrent, WinMX, Gnutella, Gnotella, BearShare, Gnucleus and GTK-Gnutella had been told: “IMMEDIATELY ensure that your system is set to prevent the application from acting as a provider of unlicensed materials to other users.”
Its quite obvious that this message did not stop students from continuing to share files and the banning of the above sites is unlikely to stop them either. New sites appear all the time and although the blocklist takes out some major torrent sources, there are many hundreds more - e.g TorrentReactor.to is blocked but not TorrentReactor.net.
The excellent Yotoshi gets no mention and even President Bush’s torrent site is unbanned and fully available. Interested students will find the Linux stuff here.
Source: TorrentFreak
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Feel free to view the letter that was sent to students from the College's Security Team at TorrentFreak. The list of banned websites is also listed there.
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