In a letter to universities and colleges across the country, representatives of “America’s creative community” are urging officials at those institutions to act on matters regarding copyright infringement.
The Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, the National Music Publishers Association and the Songwriters Guild of America came together to sign the letter.
The recording industry estimates 2.6 billion copyright infringements occur each month and more than 32 billion per year through file-sharing applications such as KaZaA.
RIAA president Cary Sherman views “the higher education community as partners” in the pact’s effort to destroy digital piracy. As such, she hopes college administrators “establish additional technical measures” to address the piracy problem.
Those technical measures include “[informing] students of their moral and legal responsibilities to respect the rights of copyright owners, specifying what practices are, and are not, acceptable on [the] school’s network, [monitoring] compliance and [imposing] effective remedies against violators.”
The issue of universities peering into the content their students access has ignited a debate throughout academia and society.
A number of universities have simply ignored the law, while others have taken additional steps to ensure their student population is not downloading illegal files. Such steps include blocking network access to sites like KaZaA and monitoring student activity on the network.
The University of South Carolina-Spartansburg purchased a Kinnetics monitoring system, which allows the university to limit streaming activity on dorm computers. If a student at USC-Spartansburg were distributing illegal files through a peer-to-peer application and the distribution took up a significant amount of bandwidth, the system would tip the university off.
The letter by “American’s creative community” was countered almost immediately by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit research center focusing on the right to privacy and civil-liberties issues.
EPIC believes universities are not the places to be monitoring student behavior.
“… Network monitoring is appropriate for certain purposes such as security and bandwidth management, the surveillance of individuals’ Internet communications implicates important rights and raises questions about the appropriate role of higher education institutions in policing private behavior,” EPIC’s letter read.
EPIC also said the level of monitoring the pact hopes universities will undertake is “not only impracticable; it is incompatible with intellectual freedom.”
“In order to monitor at the level desired by the copyright industry — to detect file transfers “without authorization” — institutions would have to delve into the content and intended uses of almost every communication,” the letter reads.
Universities have largely abstained from monitoring their students’ network activity. More universities, including the University of Wisconsin, have installed or upgraded their networks to be capable of tracking the impact of file-sharing applications on their networks.
UW upgraded its system in 2000 and at the time was believed to be the best in the country at the task. “The University of Wisconsin-Madison has done the most to carefully monitor Napster and its kin,” wrote Andrew Odlyzko, chief mathematician at AT&T Research Labs, in a paper on the subject and to DoIT. “Napster has had a noticeable effect on the growth rate of traffic on this campus, but not an outlandish one.”
While most universities have ignored the letter and refuse to delve into the network activity of their students, most enact strict policies and penalties toward those students who are caught breaking the law.
