Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Oh, the terrible injustice!

Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing passes on a quote railing against what is for some reason seen as a terrible, awful injustice being perpetrated against students at Penn State. Apparently, they aren't allowed to run servers in their dorm rooms any more unless it's for bona fide academic use and they get it signed off.

Quelle horreur! The awful injustice!

As an academic sysadmin, I see this as a fairly reasonable and fair policy. It's certainly perfectly normal in a lot of places. While students often like to think that they have an automatic entitlement to do whatever they want with network connections in their rooms, as long as they're connected through a university's network they're using university facilities and have to follow the rules. The university, in turn, have to follow other rules as well which are laid down by their own network providers. It's certainly not a given right for students to run servers in halls, and a lot of institutions NAT the halls off as well for good measure.

The last thing universities want is to open themselves up to threatening letters because their students are sharing vast amounts of copyrighted material which they don't have the rights to distribute. IT staff have got better things to do than wasting huge amounts of staff effort on investigating and responding to such complaints, such as running and developing network services. And hey, JANET-connected institutions pay by the byte for their external traffic - not very much, but it soon adds up, especially if you're being used as a giant warez/porn/copyrighted-music/movie archive by the occupants of your halls of residence.

Ultimately, most universities (and all the ones I've worked at) have the policy that their network is an academic network and is there for bona fide academic purposes only. Although (obviously) reasonable personal use is tolerated, serving out gigabytes of legally-dodgy material isn't. That's not only an infringement of both the university's and JANET's AUPs, it's also usually illegal, and it's definitely not reasonable. That's all. At Penn State, if students have stuff they want to do which involves running servers then there's a mechanism for them to be allowed to do that, so anyone doing actual interesting work rather than just running a giant archive won't have too many problems. Claiming that this policy is somehow going to harm education seems to me to be simple hyperbole.

While it's possible for digital rights campaigners (who I have to admit I often find disturbingly shrill and, on occasion, out of touch with harsh reality) to do important work - and don't get me wrong, they do - I get annoyed by this kind of unconsidered blustering against what they see as unfair policies which may, in reality, have a perfectly reasonable background. Too many of these pronouncements are made by people who don't have to deal with the live technical and policy issues on a day-to-day basis. Yes, I agree that the enforcement of copyright law in some places is getting a bit ridiculous, but no, I don't accept that the acceptable use policies of academic networks should be dictated by anyone other than the people who operate and pay for them.

So there.

[LATER EDIT: Jason has written an interesting and thought-provoking response to this. I recommend it to you - see the Trackback links. --mpk]

Posted by mpk at May 20, 2004 11:53 AM | TrackBack