Comment The freedom of speech *is* being violated (Score 1) 539
While I am not familiar with the policies on other campuses, I can speak to the policy regarding Napster that recently went into effect at my school, the University of Minnesota at Morris. According to school officials, as much as 30% of our bandwidth (which is a healthy DS3) was being taken up by Napster traffic. It was decided that this was a violation of the school's Acceptable Use Policy since it "overloaded... networks with excessive data."
While it is possible to argue that the act of blocking Napster traffic itself is an act of censorship, the school hasn't stopped there. In trying to accomplish the stated goal of reducing network traffic, they have blocked all access to the Napster domain. The University of Minnesota has four campuses, but all must send their data through the Twin Cities campus before it is sent out into the world. Traffic to any Napster servers is blocked at the Twin Cities' router. This includes access to the Napster web server.
If this was a private school, the matter might be closed. However, as a public institution, the University is an extension of the state, and any action taken by the University constitutes State action. The First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution forbid the states from abridging the freedom of speech. In preventing access to a website whose nature and purpose is to convey information is a violation of said amendments. It can be argued that there is a compelling governmental interest in limiting network traffic, but that does not allow for civil rights violations of this sort.
I am not familiar with the various blocking options on a router. It seems to me, however, that it should be possible to simply limit traffic to a certain amount of bandwidth. That would alleviate the Napster issue as stated in the policy.
For those that are interested, the school's Napster policy can be found at: http://www.mrs.umn.edu/cs/general/n apster.shtml
While it is possible to argue that the act of blocking Napster traffic itself is an act of censorship, the school hasn't stopped there. In trying to accomplish the stated goal of reducing network traffic, they have blocked all access to the Napster domain. The University of Minnesota has four campuses, but all must send their data through the Twin Cities campus before it is sent out into the world. Traffic to any Napster servers is blocked at the Twin Cities' router. This includes access to the Napster web server.
If this was a private school, the matter might be closed. However, as a public institution, the University is an extension of the state, and any action taken by the University constitutes State action. The First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution forbid the states from abridging the freedom of speech. In preventing access to a website whose nature and purpose is to convey information is a violation of said amendments. It can be argued that there is a compelling governmental interest in limiting network traffic, but that does not allow for civil rights violations of this sort.
I am not familiar with the various blocking options on a router. It seems to me, however, that it should be possible to simply limit traffic to a certain amount of bandwidth. That would alleviate the Napster issue as stated in the policy.
For those that are interested, the school's Napster policy can be found at: http://www.mrs.umn.edu/cs/general/n apster.shtml
