Article 1 - Congress, RIAA and Universities prepare for P2P "arms race"

Article 2 - Copyright Silliness on Campus

ARTICLE ONE:
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The heated debate over file sharing and the role that American colleges and universities should take in response to it ratcheted up a notch Tuesday as industry players and college and university reps gathered in DC to discuss the problem and potential solutions in a hearing before the House Committee on Science and Technology.

Universities are clear on their position: they do not see themselves as extensions of either the RIAA or the MPAA and are reluctant to get into the game of chasing down students and disciplining them at the behest of such organizations. Congress, however, is making it clear that they expect schools to do something, and the RIAA is waiting in the wings, promising to increase their use of pre-litigation letters.

House Committee members suggested that technological "solutions" should be tested more extensively at schools across the country. Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN) said that laws will not be enough to curb piracy. "Technology will be the first line of defense," he said. Thus, network monitoring services and traffic shaping tools are being discussed as the solution to this problem, but there are simultaneous warnings that schools could end up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on technology that will only be circumvented by determined students.

Dr. Charles Wight, associate VP for academic affairs and undergraduate studies at the University of Utah, said that his institution has benefited greatly from technological measures and has seen a 90% reduction in complaints from the RIAA and MPAA. Not only have students backed off file sharing, but he said that the school has saved more than $1.2 million in bandwidth fees and thousands on personnel costs.

The University of Utah uses Audible Magic's CopySense appliance on its campus residence network to thwart the sharing of files recognized by the service. Because that's not a complete solution and can easily be overcome by encryption, the school also monitors the throughput of students' machines and disables their networking capabilities if they exceed 2GB of outgoing traffic in a single day. When this happens, the university contacts the students affected and informs them about what's going on. Students who were engaging in P2P are then asked to sign a letter promising not to do it again, and Wight says there are very few repeat offenders. However, Wight did admit that their system has cut off users who were doing nothing wrong, such as using VoIP.

The entire hearing turned upon the fact that no solution is 100 percent effective and that students can get around "almost any technology solutions to this problem," as Dr. Wight noted. This problem is best addressed by throwing multiple solutions at the problem, including personalized investigation of issues when they arise.

But others warned of a costly "arms race" with students who are technically savvy and already capable of defeating many of the technological solutions on the market. Dr. Greg Jackson, VP and CIO of the University of Chicago, said that his school focuses on educational approaches to curbing piracy, and they have also seen successes that, when described, sound quite similar to that at the University of Utah.

In Jackson's view, technological solutions are not capable of truly dealing with high-traffic networks like those at major universities, because even if they are effective today, students are already finding ways around them, and P2P itself is becoming an increasingly popular approach to networking for things other than illicit file sharing. Jackson questions how something like Audible Magic will continue to work once DRM-free music sales take off, and networks are full of legitimate music files that lack DRM but look "pirated" to commercial systems.

"The only successful, robust way to address problems that involve personal responsibility and behavior is with social rather than technological tools," he said. "If we instead try and restrict behavior technologically... the only result will be an arms race that nobody wins."

The question boils down to money. How much are schools willing to pay to see this problem go away? Educational programs cost money; technological solutions cost even more. In the latter case, there's an emerging sense that making it difficult for Joe User may be worth the money, even if more savvy users can still step around such costly measures. Congress may not wait for such matters to be weighed, however. Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL) said that schools may have to adopt antipiracy technology "whether you like it or not" if the situation does not improve. "The Judiciary Committee is not going to be patient for very long," he warned.

Addendum: For those keeping score, here are some of the failed approaches that have led to the current impasse between schools and the RIAA.

Lawsuits! The original "solution" is still the most common one. It's not enough though, so they've also tried:
Free music! MIT trials LAMP to get students free access to music in a reasonable manner. "Scratch the itch" was the idea. Music industry flips out, says no way. They need money.
Free music (not really)! MIT didn't think about the RIAA's revenue concerns. Now music downloads are tested by forcing students into commercial music subscription services. Some schools are still using this, but by and large it's going nowhere. The lesson? There doesn't seem to be an easy way for the RIAA to monetize their problems.
Propaganda! Scare the bejeebus out of students by telling them that file sharing is a felonious offense. High-profile lawsuits continue, MPAA gets in on the game. This is where we are at now: the threat of legal onslaught.
A new file sharing overlord! New technological approaches to making file sharing difficult or impossible on school-owned networks. Ohio U made the jump, and others are watching. Schools can point to technological solutions and say, "hey, we're paying big bucks for the AntiPirazyZon2000+++, don't come after us!"

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ARTICLE TWO:
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By Fred von Lohmann
Wednesday, June 6, 2007; Page A23

What do Columbia, Vanderbilt, Duke, Howard and UCLA have in common? Apparently, leaders in Congress think that they aren't expelling enough students for illegally swapping music and movies.

The House committees responsible for copyright and education wrote a joint letter May 1 scolding the presidents of 19 major American universities, demanding that each school respond to a six-page questionnaire detailing steps it has taken to curtail illegal music and movie file-sharing on campus. One of the questions -- "Does your institution expel violating students?" -- shows just how out-of-control the futile battle against campus downloading has become.

As universities are pressured to punish students and install expensive "filtering" technologies to monitor their computer networks, the entertainment industry has ramped up its student shakedown campaign. The Recording Industry Association of America has targeted more than 1,600 individual students in the past four months, demanding that each pay $3,000 for file-sharing transgressions or face a federal lawsuit. In total, the music and movie industries have brought more than 20,000 federal lawsuits against individual Americans in the past three years.

History is sure to judge harshly everyone responsible for this absurd state of affairs. Our universities have far better things to spend money on than bullying students. Artists deserve to be fairly compensated, but are we really prepared to sue and expel every college student who has made an illegal copy? No one who takes privacy and civil liberties seriously can believe that the installation of surveillance technologies on university computer networks is a sensible solution.

It's not an effective solution, either. Short of appointing a copyright hall monitor for every dorm room, there is no way digital copying will be meaningfully reduced. Technical efforts to block file-sharing will be met with clever countermeasures from sharp computer science majors. Even if students were completely cut off from the Internet, they would continue to copy CDs, swap hard drives and pool their laptops.

Already, a hard drive capable of storing more than 80,000 songs can be had for $100. Blank DVDs, each capable of holding more than a first-generation iPod, now sell for a quarter apiece. Students are going to copy what they want, when they want, from whom they want.

So universities can't stop file-sharing. But they can still help artists get paid for it. How? By putting some cash on the bar.

Universities already pay blanket fees so that student a cappella groups can perform on campus, and they also pay for cable TV subscriptions and site licenses for software. By the same token, they could collect a reasonable amount from their students for "all you can eat" downloading.

The recording industry is already willing to offer unlimited downloads with subscription plans for $10 to $15 per month through services such as Napster and Rhapsody. But these services have been a failure on campuses, for a number of reasons, including these: They don't work with the iPod, they cause downloaded music to "expire" after students leave the school, and they don't include all the music students want.

The only solution is a blanket license that permits students to get unrestricted music and movies from sources of their choosing.

At its heart, this is a fight about money, not about morality. We should have the universities collect the cash, pay it to the entertainment industry and let the students do what they are going to do anyway. In exchange, the entertainment industry should call off the lawyers and lobbyists, leaving our nation's universities to focus on the real challenges facing America's next generation of leaders.

The writer is a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He represented one of the defendants in MGM v. Grokster, a landmark case concerning peer-to-peer file sharing.