Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

New rules bring online piracy fight to U.S. campuses

Colleges' options include limiting how much bandwidth can be consumed by peer-to-peer networking.
Colleges' options include limiting how much bandwidth can be consumed by peer-to-peer networking.

Starting this month, colleges and universities that don’t do enough to combat the illegal sharing of digital movies or music over their computer networks put themselves at risk of losing federal funding.

A provision of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 is making schools a reluctant ally in the entertainment industry’s campaign to stamp out unauthorized distribution of copyrighted music, movies, and TV shows.

Colleges and universities must put in place plans “to effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material by users of the institution’s network” without hampering legitimate educational and research use, according to regulations that went into effect July 1.…Read More

Ten ways to combat illegal file sharing

Knowing how to comply with HEOA might take more than a simple read-through of the law.
Knowing how to comply with HEOA might take more than a simple read-through of the law.

As colleges and universities prepare to meet a new federal directive to curb illegal file sharing, one expert has a list of 10 suggestions for educational technology officials.

In a recent webinar hosted by Audible Magic, a company that sells content protection technology to schools, participants learned that as of July 1, 2010, colleges and universities must comply with the peer-to-peer (P2P) provisions of the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA), a federal regulation that aims to stem illegal file sharing.

“This is an important issue,” said Jay Friedman, vice president of marketing for Audible Magic, “because [according to a report by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts], in just the last year, the number of lawsuits filed by the U.S. Copyright Group alone has jumped. In 2009, there were 2,000 lawsuits filed. In just the few months in 2010, 14,000 have been filed.”…Read More

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RIAA asks court to close down LimeWire

The music industry has asked a federal court in New York to order a shutdown of the LimeWire file-sharing service, CNET reports. Lawyers working for the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group for the four top record companies, filed documents on June 4 requesting that a U.S. District Court in Manhattan grant them a permanent injunction against the country’s largest commercial file-sharing service. “Every day that Lime Wire’s conduct continues unabated guarantees harm to plaintiffs that money damages cannot and will not compensate,” RIAA lawyers wrote to U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood. “The scope of the infringements that Lime Wire induced … boggles the mind.” Last month, Wood granted summary judgment in favor of the music industry’s claims that Lime Group and founder Mark Gorton committed copyright infringement, engaged in unfair competition, and induced copyright infringement. According to legal experts, Wood’s decision was probably “fatal” for the nearly 10-year-old file-sharing service…

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Schools fall victim to P2P security breaches

 

Sharing files over unsecured P2P networks can result in data breaches.
Sharing files over unsecured P2P networks can result in data breaches.

 

Peer-to-peer file sharing in schools and colleges has come under scrutiny again after a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) probe turned up massive security breaches that made student grades, Social Security numbers, and medical records accessible to anyone connected to the peer-to-peer networks at several institutions.…Read More

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UCLA partners with Clicker to fight campus file sharing

Students at UCLA don’t have to rely on illegal file-sharing sites to get their fix of online TV anymore, reports the New York Times, thanks to a new partnership with Clicker, a programming guide for online TV content that launched in November. Through this partnership, UCLA students soon will be able to use a co-branded version of Clicker that will give them convenient access to student-generated content, university-generated content, and regular online TV content and music videos from services such as Hulu. The service indexes TV shows from most American broadcast and cable networks, as well as web originals. UCLA students also will be able to access proprietary UCLA content, including videos of lectures and university events. Clicker currently indexes more than 400,000 episodes from more than 7,000 different TV shows. One organization that’s happy about this new collaboration is the Motion Picture Association of America. The organization said it applauds Clicker and UCLA “for fostering a campus culture that respects creativity and supports the livelihoods of the millions of people across the United States and around the world who create the movies and TV shows that we love, and for helping to ensure that these great jobs will be there for future college graduates.”

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