floridastudent

Alright so I heard that students are not allowed to download free music otherwise there is a heavy fine involved. Does anyone know how duke would know about the downloads and what sites they don't want you using? Is supload okay?
thank you

SirGecko

All your traffic goes through the Duke network, so they pretty much can see everything you take in or send out. I'd recommend not downloading anything illegal. It isn't a Duke rule, its the law. (the people who get "fined" are the people that get sued by music companies, most of the time you get a warning first but Duke is one of the college campuses that they've been really cracking down on)

That said, most people still don't get sued. But I wouldn't download too much.

SBR

Duke is considered an ISP. This usually means, if they want safe harbor protection against liability under the DMCA, they will need to cooperate with the RIAA/MPAA/BSA/IFPI, especially if they receive a subpoena for user information. Usually, Duke will receive a DMCA notice of alleged infringement and they will forward the email to the student. If it's the first offense and the student responds positively, then generally nothing will come of it. But repeated offenses can lead to both legal and judicial (Duke) consequences.

While Duke doesn't do deep packet inspections (like some other ISPs...*cough comcast cough*) as far as I know, that doesn't mean your activities can't be tracked. Companies like MediaSentry nab infringers because they upload not download.

If you can turn off uploading on your p2p program then you can greatly reduce your chance of being caught. If you are using bittorrent, then you can't turn off uploading. In that case, you should throttle your upload bandwidth as much as possible and not leave stuff to upload if you aren't downloading.

Edit: Duke's DMCA agent is part of the IT Security Office, therefore all DMCA infringement notices will go through them before they get to the user.