Cornell Blog: An unofficial blog about Cornell University

Kitsch magazine just put an article called Inside the Hub which no doubt evokes fond memories for all of you. It explores the internal private file sharing network that exists at Cornell as a DC++ hub server, and includes a selected quote from yours truly:

Elliott Bäck, a Cornell alumnus whose once-controversial campus blog I previously profiled in this magazine, collected data on the hub before graduating and last September posted to his blog an analysis. Bäck found over 19 terabytes comprising about 2.5 million different files shared between more than a thousand users at any given moment. (Apple’s popular—and legal—iTunes store currently has more than 6 million songs, but not even close to the over 200 thousand video files on DC++ at any one time.)

Unfortunately, the article is also heavily pro-administration and pro-RIAA, with a few ridiculous statements like:

• “When presented with a court-ordered subpoena, Cornell has little choice but to hand over this information.”
• “[A]ll Cornell can do is step back and stay as uninvolved as possible in the conflict between the entertainment industry and students.”
• “Mitrano says she has processed over 1,000 takedown notices.”

Nowhere in this article do they suggest that these things are in fact bad. For example, Cornell is able to block copyright holders from identifying alleged music pirates by filing a motion to block or quash the subpoena. Cornell also could, like Professor Charles Nesson at Harvard, actively refuse to help the RIAA’s police mission. As he points out, the purpose of a University is to teach, not enforce an archaic notion of copyright.

I’m disappointed that Rob didn’t quote my response to one of questions:

(4) As you acknowledged in your coverage, the RIAA has not sued a Harvard student yet. Is there anything Cornell can do to protect its students?

Fire Tracy Mitrano. Instead of writing memos like www.cit.cornell.edu/policy/memos/dcplus.html when she receives a request to police the Cornell LAN, she could write a letter categorically refusing to do so, as is the University’s right under the safe-harbour provisions of the DMCA.

It was designed to spark a little outrage and to highlight the fact that she’s not doing her job, unless her salary is coming from the RIAA and MPAA. Note that I am not a lawyer, and in no way this post should constitute any sort of legal advice.

Update: Hurray, I’ve been misquoted by Tracy Mitrano who writes in today’s Sun that “a DC++ posting”–hey we call that a blog entry–concludes with the statement “Fire Mitrano”–which as you can see it does not. It actually concluded with “Fire Tracy Mitrano,” an error so severe given the ready access to the source material above, that I’m not surprised the article offers no insight into what happens when Cornell actually receives a subpoena, or what Cornell is doing to protect its students from predatory lawsuits.

I left the following comment on Christian Montoya’s post about The College Freeway, a new site which collects college-related documents, but it appears it has been deleted caught in the spam filters:

I took a look at The College Freeway and I’m not impressed. I hate to be so negative, but it seems like a less-useful Scribd ripoff designed expressly to either (a) help college students cheat on work or (b) violate the copyrights of people running the course. Scribd, like Google docs, is a generic document sharing and collaboration site, whereas TCF seems to encourage abuse.

Since there are already a few thousand documents, I can’t give numbers, but stuff in CS100 is ripped off of Charles F. Van Loan’s textbook, and the CS211 resource is stolen from a TA’s online course notes. Neither of these is public domain, or under a copyleft license.

You should take a look at TheCollegeFreeway yourself, and see if my assessment of the site is correct. To Christian’s credit, the site is nicely designed, but personally I wouldn’t want to work on a project I knew to built on a business model of theft:

To give you some examples of material that shouldn’t be copied:

• 9 chapters of Charles Van Loan’s Introduction to Computational Science and Mathematics
• 31 course problem sets and prelims for COMS381
• More prelims and problem sets from AEM 221
• The entire course materials for BIOG 110
• Lots of the professor’s ECE 303 hw solutions, which are handwritten.

On the other hand, there is some useful material there, like these class notes for ORIE 568, which falls on the legal side of the line. I usually side with pirates when it comes to electronic copying, but pirates are people stealing from the big bad record companies, who are also basically evil. The two morally negate each other. However, non profit educational organizations are not evil; their copyright materials are what they use to educate you. So, I get more irritated when they’re ripped off.

You may have heard that years of Media Defender emails have become publicly available. Media Defender, a company which uploads and shares fake media files on various file sharing networks to try and reduce piracy, is the RIAA/MPAA’s first line of defense in their fight against illegal file sharing. And you, as a college student, are probably one of their targets.

Media Defender recruited heavily at Harvey Mudd, and also tapped university pools for interns. The best way to fight a young generation of file-hungry students is clearly by hiring some of them to turn against their peers and protect big-media. Their concern with educational institutions seems limited at best. On April 12th, Media Defender president Randy Saaf asked:

Universal is curiouse if we have any historical data over the last 3 months that show whether .edu IP addresses on p2p have gone down. They want to see if their lawsuits are getting students to stop using p2p (take a moment to laugh to yourself). Let me know if anyone has any ideas.

So, Media Defender understands that it can’t win against University students well supplied with bandwidth and torrenting knowledge, and it doesn’t seem to care. Other emails suggest that .edu ip addresses comprised 2.5% of their Gnutella network monitoring in April, but only .65% in July. Either way, .edu is a small fish in Media Defender’s pond.

Does this mean you should relax? No. Media Defender is still out there poisoning a shared resource, wasting bandwidth, and trying to bait Americans into downloading “fake” files. Even if they don’t care about you as a University student, and aren’t trying to sue you (see RIAA and MPAA for that), they’re still just making filesharing a less efficient environment. Blocking their ips is a good way to start; reading more about the leaked email is another trail to follow.