MPAA Shuts Down Town's Free Muni WiFi Over 1 Download
The MPAA forced the town Coshocton, OH to shut down their entire free municipal WiFi network because of a single instance of a single user illegally downloading a copyrighted movie. Here are some of the many other things the town used to use the network for:
Mike LaVigne, IT director, said the number of people who access the Internet using the connection varies widely, from perhaps a dozen people a day to 100 during busy times such as First Fridays and the Coshocton Canal Festival.
It's used by Coshocton County Sheriff's deputies who can park in the 300 block and complete a traffic or incident report without leaving their vehicle. Out-of-town business people can park and use their laptops to make connections.During festival times, vendors find it a convenience to check the status of credit cards being used to make purchases, LaVigne said.
Because it's a single address used by many people, it's difficult to tell who made the illegal download, although the county plans to investigate the matter.
Illegal movie download forces shutdown of free Wi-Fi [Coschton Tribune via BoingBoing] (Photo: ashestoages)
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So what movie was it? Hopefully it wasn't the Love Guru. That movie has been ruining and destroying lives for years.
@Nick1693: Because the MPAA has very deep pockets that contain lots of politicians with grabby hands.
Here's an idea: ignore the MPAA and keep the service up. We don't permanently shut down the roads when one person uses them to commit a crime, do we?
They don't have any sort of proxy they have logs on?
@Nick1693: If it's encrypted on both sides, what's to be afraid of? Do you ever log onto your email from a computer besides your own?
It's not clear that the MPAA did anything more than just notify the city. Since when does the MPAA have judicial powers? The proper response by Mr. Lavine would be to tell the MPAA that the town shares the MPAA's goal against piracy and would happily do something to prevent it. Maybe the MPAA would dig deep into its very deep pockets and come up with $2,900 instead of buying another Congressman.
What a bunch of coshocton. Did they bother using the filter Nazis at Websense? I know I've encountered their shit at work when I browse legitimately innocuous sites at work. There's nothing like getting an e-mail from the network admin because key words in a style script triggered a porn alert. Anyway, if they used filtering a la public library-esque then they would have been fine.
@GitEmSteveDave_IsSlacking: Encrypted means it can be decrypted if someone wanted to.
Also, I use Gmail with SSL always on, but yes. =)
Wow, the MPAA sure has an awful lot of power. They can shut down an entire network just on their say-so that someone pirated a movie on it? If this is permissible, why don't they just order the entire Internet shut down?
Fear of big-money liability makes this stuff happen all the time. Also possible is that people in charge of wireless decisions get convinced by cash in the dead of night that this is an excellent reason to shut thiungs down. Coincidentally next month or next week there will be an announcement that it would be more cost effective for the city to hire this kind of work out to a company that does wireless. This is usually accompanied by a no-bid dead-of-night decision on which company it should be.
Maybe I'm just being a little cynical...
@Nick1693: Transmitting over any medium means it can be intercepted and recorded. That goes for talking, writing, wifi, wired, semaphore, smoke signals, etc...
@Nick1693: That makes no sense. What would be the purpose of encrypting information if it couldn't be decrypted? Of course it can be decrypted, but not just "if someone wanted to". That is of course assuming they are following current practices.
@G.O.B.: Come on!: Actually, I think most public libraries (in towns around me at least) don't have any kind of filtering due to 1st amendment concerns (at least, I think that's why.) Which is why my friend who works in the Children's section of her library often has to chase perverts away who are looking at (and showing off) porn on the computers meant for the kids.
Think the headline is a bit misleading. It should have read "town over-reacts to MPAA notice and shuts down free wireless".
Coshocton needs a to grow a pair...
This story stunk of dishonesty from the very headline, and if you read the letter itself, it's obvious what really happened. 'Municipal wifi' is apparently a single access point that the administrators of the town's IT decided they'd be nice and leave unsecured. Someone downloaded something illegally from that AP, the MPAA's investigators saw it, and they did what has always been a reflex for them - sent a letter to the ISP informing them of the piracy and asking for the identity of the user. The IT dude, rather than go through the trouble of fighting it or trying to comply, just shut down that AP. A quote from the Commissioner suggests there may have also been a tiny bit of kindergarten-teacher-punishing-the-class. That's all. The RIAA is one of the most evil corporate organizations on the planet, but they simply didn't do anything spectacular or even unusual here.
I actually just registered an account because of this post. Consumerist, I've been reading for a while now, and I'm pretty disappointed in this one. Please don't jump into panic parties like this; I count on you guys as a generally level and reliable source of info. Thanks for at least not using Cory Doctorow's references to the Geneva convention - sometimes I am embarrassed to be on the same side of the issue as he is.
Wait, a private company can shut down a municipal service just by complaining? This is so wrong.
@bohemian: Didn't Comcast do that in Philadelphia already? Or did they just prevent them from putting it in in the first place?
That's ridiculous...it's the equivalent of shutting down public roads because someone snuck their friends into a drive-in movie in the trunk.
Private industry now has judicial power over government?
@DanKelley98: Exactly. There's nothing in the article that says the MPAA forced the shutdown of the service.
However, if Coshocton is so cash strapped that they can't figure out how to prevent this on their public WiFi or at least set up a terms of use page before allowing people on, they SHOULD disconnect it b/c they're in way over their heads.
@GitEmSteveDave_IsSlacking: It's not really feeling secure, just a little more protected than a normal login.
the mpaa can kiss the hariest, whitest part of my @$$
i hope they have very pain full deaths/homicides.
@acasto: Hashing passwords, like Gawker did. (Why we need to add a valid email to our accounts if we want to keep our name on the new Consumerist platform.)
@selianth: Why does that fall under first amendment rights? You can say whatever you want but downloading/viewing content on any website at a library isn't exactly your free speech or even freedom of the press depending on the site? Congress can't make the law, and neither can a municipality below it, but a director of an institution could make a user TOS about the internet they provide. I'd think even doubly so since generally you need membership log in info via your library card for this sort of thing.
Also I hope your friend gets a good punch in now and then and calls the cops.
MPAA did not ask them to shut the network down. The county shut it down themselves.
[www.coshoctontribune.com]
LaVigne has done some homework and found a program that would prevent the illegal downloads from happening in the future; however, it would cost the cash-strapped county about $2,900 to implement, $2,000 for equipment and then $900 annually for the filtering program.
Commissioners questioned whether the investment would be justified for the free service, but LaVigne said it could be put to use on the entire county system to monitor activity.
[www.dslreports.com]
@thisistobehelpful: While I don't like it, since libraries are (typically) government resources for the public, if they decide to start blocking websites, they they are denying people the ability to view those websites and censoring the content of those websites.
It's a questionable area and I don't think I've ever read anything about any actual court cases...
@JediJohn82: +1
@thisistobehelpful: See, the library is a government entity. And the funny thing about the government is that it has a pretty hefty set of TOS. It's called the Constitution. So yeah, I'm pretty sure that's covered under free speech.
the mpaa can kiss the hariest whitest par of my @$$. hope they have painful deaths/homocides.
@Nick1693: Incident reports are public records. I can stroll into the police station, ask for the report of the accident you got into last week, and they HAVE to give it to me (eventually, anyway).
Credit cards (and related technology), on the other hand, have so many inherent security flaws that IMHO one more way to exploit them doesn't really matter.
@delphi_ote: Nice analogy, delphi. My personal favorite, however, is that nobody has ever sued Smith & Wesson for a murder. Why shut down an ISP for a users' SUPPOSED* infringement?
*(I say supposed because without a judgment or conviction, there's no proof that the MPAA's allegations are true.)
@DanKelley98: @sven.kirk: I don't get how this download was unforeseen. If they're going to react by shutting down the system, I must say they should have known people would be getting porn, music, and movies with it - at the very least. It looks more like they didn't do their homework before spending public money to setup this wi-fi.
@sven.kirk: Did the Geek Squad at Best Buy give him that quote? I'm not an IT guy, but I know it's not that hard to set up filters that put limits on bandwidth rate and amount, and block certain sites and packet types. And that is within the capabilities of an OS like Windows Server, simple firewalls and the routers and switches they should already have in place for the ~300 employees the article said they have.
Why would the county shut it down just for that?
the ability to use any technology for anything illegal means many things could soon be banned, google, cars, guns, cameras, construction equipment, food...
Obviously no one would let this happen, but heres a slippery slope we are getting on
@Nick1693: Are you under the impression that anything done over the Internet is not subject to snooping? It's not just Wifi. Do a traceroute sometime and see how many snooping points there are.
@DH405: I know how many possible points there are to snoop, but I don't recall Lifehacker ever posting an article of using a wired network for snooping. (I've never tried any snooping, so I have no idea.)
Sensationalize much?
@golddog: It is bloody impossible to stop 100% of the people from doing it 100% of the time. There's always a workaround, and taking this sort of approach is insanity on both ends.
I don't think I like the idea of personal info being sent over a public WiFi network, especially incident reports or credit card info.
I do see how this could be convenient though, but why does the MPAA have this much control over what can happen to a network?