File Sharing

<p>What is UVa's policy on students who may violate copyright law by downloading or uploading music, movies, etc? Obviously, I know they don't condone it. However, will they fight the RIAA, MPAA, or anyone else who comes after a student? Or will they give them your name without a fight? Is the student expelled, suspended, or punished by UVa if he does violate copyright law? Since I am on this- how closely does UVa spy on student's activities on the network including internet access? Are any sites blocked by a proxy filter?</p>

<p>ITC does not seem to care what you download as long as you don't download over a set maximum amount of data. They just limit your bandwidth after a few infractions. This is the only confirmed restriction I recall that ITC enforces. There are rumors that all torrents will eventually be blocked from downloading on the network.</p>

<p>Are programs such as mytunes and ourtunes allowed which allow me to have all of the itunes files on a hall downloaded to my own itunes? (ithink?)</p>

<p>Those programs are okay.</p>

<p>how about limewire? is it allowed?</p>

<p>Limewire sucks. Welcome to 2001, lol.</p>

<p>I haven't had any trouble using bittorrent. Ourtunes/mytunes work fine if you can get other users on your local network.</p>

<p>ITC's policy as of 06/07 was that you would receive the first punishment if you broke their limits (5 standard deviations from the mean) three times in a two week period. it's honestly a lot of bandwidth they let us transfer, I'll leave it to you to find out approximately what 5 standard deviations is.</p>

<p>the university gives priority data transfer within the university so you'll find downloading files within the uva network will be much faster than from the outside.</p>

<p>dont see why limewire suck but anyway.. music should not be a problem since u can download it from the UVA network</p>

<p>Limewire has crappy selection, slow downloads and TONS of spam. GL sorting through it. Try something more...modern and you'll see why I lol'd. The grass IS green with other file transfer applications.</p>

<p>limewire is still useful for finding individual songs, the trick is to sort by song length (then look at bitrates if you aren't trying to conserve space) to remove all of the spam and fake files. What's left is generally the real deal.</p>

<p>you guys shouldn't steal music</p>

<p>So how often do people get served by the RIAA or MPAA?</p>

<p>ummmm...never?</p>

<p>I've never heard of anyone getting served with a lawsuit by the RIAA or the MPAA. I don't download movies. That's wrong.</p>

<p>i don't know how often people get sued--its likely not often. if you do your up *****s creek though.</p>

<p>jags- if people want to steal music, let them.
they're not going to listen to anyone, so leave it be.
If you guys wanna watch movies, there is a site that streams them although it might pause a few times and you have to wait for it, but its not stealing etc...
tv-links.co.uk</p>

<p>honuwebd,</p>

<p>im not physically stopping anyone from downloading music. people can do what they want. its still wrong though--and i'll continuously tell them so.</p>

<p>according to your logic if everyone murdered a bunch of people, and nobody could do anything to effectively stop it, i should just "leave it be."</p>

<p>Lol, downloading music isn't wrong. The RIAA is wrong, got it?</p>

<p>cav,</p>

<p>i hate to break it to you, but downloading music illegally is definitely wrong. got it?</p>

<p>Its pretty obvious that illegally downloading music is wrong (that is not to say that I have never done it, I will admit that I have done it before and will probably do it again at some time in the future). You are gaining access to intellectual property that you have not paid for access to.</p>

<p>That said the RIAA and MPAA's response to illegal media and intellectual property sharing, namely DRM (I'm not a fan of the DMCA either, but thats more Clinton/late 90's congress's fault than media corp's, though they had a hand in it) is just as bad, if not worse.</p>

<p>[rant]
So the problem is, stealing music is wrong, but the RIAA's response to it is just as wrong. That, of course, does not make it ok to steal music. It becomes even worse when they drench it in DRM, because that ends up costing the end consumer a ton of money, and the DRM will get hacked anyways. Increasing CD prices from DRM implimentation and research, as well as CD prices in response to a lack of sales because the RIAA is so damn greedy. The end result is that illegal music down laods increase, and the artist gets a lower and lower share of the profit from CD sales.</p>

<p>As it is now, artists get very little profit from their CD's. New artists usually get NO profit from the CD's because the studio has to use it to pay back recording costs, so when they don't sell enough CD's, the RI takes another huge loss, and the artist doesn't get the opportunity to make another CD and then they fall off the map. Where the artist makes their money is selling merch and selling out shows, but if they can't pay back the record company from CD sales they are screwed.</p>

<p>so the point is, the RIAA is a group of greedy pigs that eats babies and sues children. But by stealing music the problem only gets worse. Do you honestly think that someone high up in a record company is ever going to take a pay cut? HELL NO, so prices go up and you get screwed. This is the major problem with the modern economy. America is no longer a capitalist nation, voting with your wallet only results in increased prices for the end user and an increased gap between the rich and poor (actually has similar effects to socialism, but I digress) Now that I think about it, most of this post is a digression, so I am going to kill it here and call it a day.</p>

<p>[/rant]</p>