[Michlib-l] Illegal downloading

[Mark Ehle]

It's happened to us a number of times over the years. There is not a whole
lot you can do about it, because a lot of P2P traffic  uses port 80. If you
block port 80 that pretty much kills the internet for folks. The only thing
I can think of doing would be to apply some sort of bandwidth throttling
that would make it too painful to download mass quantities of anything.

We just a couple of days ago talked to our Merit reps about this very
subject and asked them if there was anything they could to to help on their
end. They said they would try to find out but did not sound hopeful. It's
interesting that the movie houses can tell what's going on but the ISP's
can't. .

Once we had to ban a person's device from our wireless network because we
received 4 warnings in a month. We looked at our wireless logs and noticed
that one device had downloaded 1.4 terabytes when the next closest one was
400 meg. After we blocked the offending device from accessing our network
the warnings stopped. We don't know if it was coincidental or not.

The Merit reps said that large networks like universities and such get
these warnings all the time and to their knowledge, no one has ever been
dinged for it beyond the warning.

Hope this helps -

Mark Ehle
Computer Support Librarian
Willard Library
Battle Creek, MI
office: (269) 968-8166

On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 3:38 PM, Pamela Spoor <pspoor at manisteelibrary.org>
wrote:

> Has anyone received notices from the Internet Service Provider of patrons
> downloading movie files illegally?   Using Bit Torrent or other file
> sharing applications? If so, what is the organization doing to combat this,
> if anything?
>
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