Another setback for university P2P

Last week, a federal judge dismissed the University of Oregon's arguments that the RIAA's attempts to obtain information on student file sharers was unduly burdensome. According to Ars Technica, the judge also ruled that the school did not receive protection under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, since none of the files were hosted on school servers.

The RIAA can now serve a new, slightly more restrictive subpoena on the University of Oregon, which RIAA spokesperson Cara Duckworth tells Ars it plans to do in "short order." Once served, the university will need to provide the names, addresses, and phone numbers of the possible infringers; it will be up to the RIAA to try to determine which of those people were actually using Gnutella to share music.

I hate to say it, but it's time for universities to simply kill P2P traffic on their networks. Yes, there are some legitimate uses for the technology, but basically, it's one big liability for students and schools. Regardless of how you feel about DRM, public universities are wasting countless taxpayer dollars defending what seems to be not very defendable.

Is it censorship? Probably not. Would universities be caving to the RIAA? Probably. However, I can imagine so many ways in which university IT departments can spend their resources beyond digging up litigation materials. Just block the traffic and move on.