Open letter to UF Department of Housing

Tue Sep 02, 2008 19:52 (UTC -5)

Dear University of Florida Department of Housing and Residence Education,

I’m starting my second year living on campus. During my first year, I was pretty satisfied with your DHNet Internet service. It’s amazingly fast and pretty reliable. You helped me out with connecting to the network even though I wasn’t using Windows or Mac OS X. That, my friends, is baller.

While I was home for the summer, I discovered the wonders of BitTorrent. This network protocol puts all kinds of useful and enriching media at our fingertips… if our network lets us access it.

Your say on your web site that you block BitTorrent traffic due to copyright and bandwidth concerns. UF is “partially held accountable for every violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) committed on its network and faces sharp penalties for each offense,” you say. But that hasn’t stopped other universities from challenging the MAFIAA‘s abusive DMCA letters that target their students.

Banning BitTorrent is not the way. It has a wealth of legitimate uses, including downloading Linux distributions (thanks again for helping me out, by the way). Many people use plain old HTTP to download stuff illegally, but you don’t seem to worry about that. Aren’t you trying to prevent all DMCA violations? Doesn’t seem like it to me.

Now, I’m not advocating that people violate copyright. I make sure that all the files I download are out there because their authors want them to be. I frequent(ed) sites like LegalTorrents and Jamendo, which provide only Creative Commons-licensed material that is free to share. They have some good stuff. If nothing else, you could allow access to their BitTorrent trackers.

In your FAQ, you mention — in passing — that bandwidth is also a concern. With download speeds in the range of megabytes per second, I wonder how much traffic it would take for the network to slow down noticeably for others.

This is not about downloading Hollywood movies; it’s about encouraging the development of a culture in which everyone can exchange ideas on an equal footing, even if some of those ideas take up more megabytes than others. Shouldn’t one of America’s top 50 universities be supporting that ideal?

College students are not little kids. Stop treating us like them. It’s amazing how people can behave if you actually trust them.

Love,
Jordon Kalilich, 2EG