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September 21, 2007 > News > BitTorrent sites banned by Rice IT

BitTorrent sites banned by Rice IT

By Lily Chun | Thresher Editorial Staff

Students were concerned at the beginning of the semester that BitTorrent was blocked on the Rice Owls wireless network. However, Vice Provost of Information Technology Kamran Khan said BitTorrent itself was not blocked, but rather sites that can be accessed to download files through BitTorrent were blocked.

Information Security Officer Marc Scarborough said these sites were banned because the content of the sites were almost entirely pirated. The illegal and malicious content on the sites could get the university in trouble, Scarborough said.

“What students are saying is they can no longer use BitTorrent applications to access some of the sites that really have nothing other than malicious or illegal content,” Scarborough said. “But BitTorrent itself has a lot of very legitimate uses for it.”

Brown College senior Chris Jackson said the change came as an unwelcome surprise.

“I used it during O-Week, and once school started, it was restricted all of a sudden,” Jackson said. “I was thinking, ‘Why would they do this?’ They didn’t post anything about it, and they didn’t tell us why they did it.”

Jackson said IT blocked major torrent sites like Pirate Bay, Iso-Hunt and Torrent Spy.

Scarborough said IT has also reduced bandwidth for BitTorrent in the past couple of years because of complaints from entertainment industries. IT reduced the bandwidth for BitTorrent even more at the beginning of last semester because of the increased intensity with which entertainment industries were pursuing offenders. In the summer of 2005, Rice received a subpoena from the Recording Industry Association of America for the first time.

Additionally, Khan said there was a nation-wide spike December in the number of infringement notices that entertainment industries sent to universities. In November 2006, Rice received five complaints. In December 2006, the number increased to 28 complaints. In January 2007, Rice received a staggering 84 complaints — more than fifteen times the number of complaints in November.

“We received those complaints and subpoenas, and we are legally required to respond to them,” Scarborough said.

In addition to having to deal with industry lawyers, Scarborough said IT had to resolve the over 250 notices received last semester. Khan said his office spends somewhere from 1 - 1.5 hours on each complaint, tracking the user and speaking with them privately.

“It really does take a lot of our time and effort to track people down,” Scarborough said. “We could be putting that time into doing other things. Our disaster recovery planning takes a backseat to some of these things.”

Scarborough said another reason bandwidth was reduced was to ensure that students, faculty and staff could easily access the internet for important functions such as e-mail and Web browsing.

“We want to make sure that somebody is not taking all of the bandwidth away from them so they can’t do their job,” Scarborough said. “Some of the applications would take up 80 - 85 percent of the bandwidth, so e-mail and Web browsing suffered greatly.”

Scarborough said it was important that people realize some things were simply illegal.

“Let’s face the facts of life: There are things you can do and can’t do,” Khan said. “We don’t want students to get into trouble, but we have no choice but to take seriously infringement of copyrights.”

End of article

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