AfterDawn: News

Vivendi launches a tool to monitor campus networks

Music and movie industry, namely Vivendi's two subsdiaries Universal Music Group and Vivendi Universal Entertainment, have developed an open source software called Automated Copyright Notice System (or ACNS) that should allow administrators of campus networks to better monitor and restrict their traffic. The first ACNS system will be implemented at University of California at Los Angeles which has one of the largest number of students in the United States.

The system basically tries to automate the DMCA (American copyright legislation) process -- the ACNS-compliant DMCA complaint notifications will contain XML tags that will automatically launch the ACNS process, using network admins parameters and possibly blocking the infringing IP address from using P2P services or the whole network. For universities and other large organizations the system is tempting as according to the DMCA legislation they have to act within a rather short period of time -- and if they fail to do so, they're open to litigation themselves as well.



It is highly likely that the system will raise some serious privacy concerns and also "false positives", if the network admins simply allow the software to block users from the Net without bothering to check whether they did something wrong or not. Imagine spam emails with ACNS tags...

Source: CIO Today

Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 19 Apr 2004 15:10

• Previous article

• LAME developer talks about the recent v3.96 update

• Next article

• EFF worried about Californian anti-piracy bills

• 4 comments

• pcshateme

  well if its open source people like me will get it and figure out how to reverse engineer it. :)

  19.4.2004 16:33 #1

• nato1200

  i thought the key-words in that story were "open source". this should be an interesting watch this unfold. not to mention, vivendi being a french company. i dont think that will help anything since the policing process of educational campuses in starting in the U.S.

  19.4.2004 18:23 #2

• Vular

  That won't go very far, they're french, just kidding lol, or am I.........Muh ha ha ha!

  19.4.2004 18:57 #3

• Praetor

  Well there's a minor problem with their "plan" ... the "hardcore traders" on university campuses and such dont bother wasting time with the provided network infrastructure (since most of the time there are stupid rules and quotas etc), but they setup private network rings instead... routers and switches are cheap anyways.... heheh I know we had a couple 24port switches on our floor when I was in residence :P
  

  ASUS A7V8X-X, AMD2500+
  Samsung 1024MB, PC2700
  480GB [3x160GB, 7200, 8MB]
  MSI Starforce, GeForce4 Ti4400 128MB
  
  Rules and Policies: http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/2487
  AFTERDAWN IRC: irc.addictz.net, #ad_buddies
  COME SAY HI!

  19.4.2004 22:13 #4