Petteri Pyyny
19 Apr 2004 15:10
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