In Which A University SysAdmin Responds to My Penn State Server Post

After reading Cory's post about my account of Penn State's new no-sever policy, Not In Production had this to say:

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.

I think this is exactly the rationale Penn State used for its server ban and one that makes sense from this perspective. The underlying question, though, is what values should predominate University technology policy?

True, banning servers cuts down on infringement. So would banning email and IM and even web surfing for that matter. The only reason University IT departments don't get a flood of DMCA take-down notices for IP violations via those means is because the RIAA and MPAA can't snoop on them like they can on P2P.

But there are other values to consider -- like education and academic freedom. If the mission of a University is primarily to help students expand their minds and learn, then we have to be extremely careful about limitations that restrict that potential. This doesn't mean we should ignore copyright infringment, but heavy-handed approaches have real effects. Penn State's approach assumes all servers are being used for illegal activities and places an affirmative burden on students to jump through numerous hoops just to earn the right to learn or speak via server technology. I don't know about you, but most educators I know want to lower the barriers to learning, not raise them.

And as far as what servers get used for, I think the demon of copyright infringement has jaded our viewpoint. Servers are used by many students for entirely legal purposes that may not be officially academic but are still valuable. This blog, for instance, could be something hosted by me on my own server if I were a student. Would that qualify as an "official academic project"? What if I used it to critique the faculty at Penn State and none of them would give me written permission to deploy it?

The point is, Universities serve (so to speak) many functions. When institutions like Penn State begin to make copyright enforcement more important that academic freedom, education, and self-expression, we should question those decisions and how they relate to the overall mission of higher education.

Comments

[Cypherpunk]

What you say is true, that there are many legitimate uses for "servers" (in the sense of any computer that responds to requests) beyond copyright infringement. The language in the letter you quote seems to ignore this fact and treat the two as synonymous.

But that viewpoint is valid as well, because the truth is that the overwhelming majority of students running servers will be for these illegal purposes. This may be an inconvenient and unpleasant fact, but it is almost certainly true. And your reasoning doesn't come to grips with this reality. Until you are willing to do so, talking about hypothetical blog servers and the like will not have any impact on the decisions of network administrators who are faced with ugly reality every day.

The truth is that the illegal and illicit actions of students have been encouraged by an internet culture which says that such actions are proper and justified. This is the ultimate cause of the mismatch between theory and reality in the administrators' actions. You and others have encouraged students to believe that illicit file sharing is OK, and this false belief is contradicted by the legal situation in which the school finds itself.

The real problem is that your theoretical analysis has a huge hole. You want to see students allowed to run legitimate servers, but you are completely silent on whether they should be allowed to run ones that infringe copyright. You know it won't work to tell administrators that their students should be allowed to infringe copyright because copyright is evil or because the record companies don't pay enough royalties to the musicians. But you can't bring yourself to criticize the students for file sharing and to blame them for bringing this ban down on themselves. Until you are willing to take one stand or the other, you have no grounds for drawing conclusions on this issue.

[Jason]

Cypher -- I'm surprised at you. I usually enjoy your comments and thoughts, but this one feels more like an ad hominem attack. I have never and will never "encourage students to believe that illicit file sharing is OK" and I resent the impliication that I have. True, I believe we should find a way to legalize file-sharing by compensating artists so we don't have to watch the RIAA and other forces decend upon individual Americans and their families with the kind of destructive vigor we've seen so far. But that doesn't mean I think what they are doing is right. I'm proposing a policy solution, not a justification.

As far as what students are using servers for, you say "the truth is that the overwhelming majority of students running servers will be for these illegal purposes" without any justification for your statement. Do you have any evidence to back this up? Or is it you who are stretching reality to justify your personal agenda?

The reality is that I don't know what students are using servers for. My critique is that educational institutions are making the assumption that they are being used solely for infringement without proof. I can understand why university sysadmins would think this, given that they probably only hear about servers when they are involved in illegal activity. And I think in those situations, the university has every right to shut those servers down. But I think its wrongheaded to impose a complete ban on technology because even a majority of users are using it for illegal purposes. I mean, I could easily make the argument that a majority of encryption users are probably using encryption to hide illegal or socially irredeemable activities. Should we ban that as well? Under your logic (and burden of proof), I would think so.

[Jim]

As an already-overworked higher-ed sysadmin, may I simply ask this question:

How will you pay for it?

How will you pay for the rapidly-increasing costs when 40% of your university's bandwidth is being eaten by student FTP servers and P2P clients, and legitimate research and university business is being negatively impacted?

How will you pay for the networking hardware, administrative software, and wired (and unwired) infrastructure to support the exponential growth of bandwidth-eating projects?

How will you pay for the people and expertise to manage all this, to support it, to respond to the network-threatening issues that will arise like clockwork?

I work in Higher Ed IT, have been doing it for 14 years at some of the largest state universities in the nation. I get paid to Make Things Work. I can talk ethics, ideals, and philosophy with the best of them - it's what my formal training is it. But at the end of the day, I have to maintain a reasonably stable and secure computing environment, within the ever-tightening resource constraints I have to work in.

You want freedom? It COSTS, my friend. Come up with a scenario for funding unlimited IT that is more concrete than "the state/federal government should support this, it's imperative!"

When you have that, I'll listen to this *very* academic argument.

Until then, well. I don't have a lot of time for ivory tower thinkers with caviar ideals and bologna resources. I've got a network to keep alive.

[Jason]

You raise many excellent points, Jim, but again, I think you're making a number of assumptions that may not be true. If bandwidth and overhead are the issues, deal with those issues by limiting bandwidth -- not by baning server technology. Students can run servers with reasonable bandwidth caps.

And I'm entirely sympathetic to the huge burden placed on Higher Ed IT folks, not only for network consistency and security, but also for responding to DMCA and other legal notices. But again, I don't think the answer is an entire ban on technology. You certainly have the right to discipline students for instigating illegal conduct using the university network, but it should be the illegal conduct that triggers the sanctions, not simply the use of technology that in and of itself is value neutral.

The Penn State officials made it clear that the reason for the "no server" ban isn't bandwidth, security, or overhead but rather copyright enforcement. Thus, my quarrel with them is over that trade-off. Limitations made for other reasons may not be as troublesome.

[chuck]

case in point: in 2001 penn state limited users to 1.5 mbps up and down. They said they were going to increase it annulally, but they didnt, now it seems like every site that i go to had flash ads and such, penn state needs to give us more, Why? Because we paid for it!