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Hello,

Recently, our library received a Notice of Claimed Infringement letter from
MediaSentry, a company who scours the web looking for pirated materials on
behalf of their clients; in this instance,  Worldwide Sony Pictures
Entertainment Acquisitions Inc.

It seems a patron connected to our wireless network and made available for
download, via BitTorrent, some pirated material on his/her laptop. This is
not the first notice of this nature we've received. Are any other libraries
having this problem? What are you doing about it?

The way I see it, we have three options:
- Do nothing, and reply to each notice with a statement that we are a public
library offering free and unrestricted wireless Internet access for our
patrons to use with their own computers.
- Discontinue offering the wireless connections to our patrons. Because of
the heavy use at all of our locations, that wouldn't be well received.
- Spend several thousand dollars on a hardware/software solution that would
prevent this type of activity. Attempting to manually block all the possible
ports and IP ranges at the firewall would be ineffective because of the
file-sharing programs' ability to use nearly any available port.

I'd like to know how other libraries are handling this.
Thanks for any guidance offered!

Felix Hotard
West Florida Public Library