[Infowarrior] - Politicos threaten schools over campus piracy

Thu Jun 7 18:43:19 UTC 2007

CNET News.com    http://www.news.com/
Politicos threaten schools over campus piracy

By Anne Broache
http://news.com.com/Politicos+threaten+schools+over+campus+piracy/2100-1028_
3-6188887.html

Story last modified Tue Jun 05 17:23:38 PDT 2007

WASHINGTON--Politicians on Tuesday threatened to enact new laws if
universities don't do more to prevent their students from unlawfully
swapping music, movies and other copyrighted files on campus networks.

At the latest in what has become a multiyear series of hearings focused on
university campus piracy, members of the U.S. House of Representatives'
Science and Technology Committee said college administrators must seriously
consider using not only educational campaigns but also technological filters
to reduce illicit file swapping among students.

"Illegal file sharing isn't just about royalty fees," committee chairman
Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) said at the hearing, which lasted a little more than
an hour. "It clogs campus networks and interferes with the educational and
research mission of universities."

Relatively cheap broadband connections and readily available digital media
works have made it easier and more tempting than ever to share copyrighted
content illegally, said Rep. Ralph Hall (R-Texas), the committee's ranking
member. "This rampant disregard for copyright law needs to end," he told the
panel, which included administrators from the University of Chicago,
Illinois State University, Arizona State University and the University of
Utah.

The problem in policing Internet connections is, however, that besides April
Fools' jokes like the omniscience protocol, it's hardly easy for a network
provider to detect which packets are carrying illegal copyrighted material
and which are not. About the best universities can do is measure the amount
of information transmitted, which might indicate unlawful content--or might
not, because there are many legitimate academic uses for
bandwidth-saturating activity. And encrypted data can make any kind of
filtering task near-impossible.

Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.), also a member of the House Judiciary Committee,
which writes copyright laws, suggested Congress should withhold funding from
universities if they don't police their networks adequately. Universities
receive tens of billions of dollars a year in federal research money, and
the Department of Education handed out $82 billion in 2007 in new grants and
loans to students.

"We're spending a good deal of federal resources in terms of helping
universities with their technological improvements, directly and
indirectly," Feeney said. "Is it responsible for a Congress that wants to
protect intellectual property rights to continue to fund network
enhancements for universities if some of those enhancements are indirectly
being used in fact to promote intellectual property theft?" (That seemed to
be a reference to the Internet2 project, funded in part by taxpayers.)

Tuesday's hearing comes as both politicians and entertainment industry
representatives have continued to pressure universities to crack down on
perceived piracy problems. The Recording Industry Association of America and
the Motion Picture Association of America sent letters in late April to the
presidents of 40 universities in 25 states, asking them to halt their
students' use of programs that allow them to trade files against their
schools' local area networks while skirting the public Internet.

And last month, the leaders of the Judiciary Committee, including longtime
copyright crackdown advocates Reps. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Howard Berman
(D-Calif.), sent letters to 19 universities considered to be the top piracy
offenders, asking a number of questions about the policies they have in
place and threatening to consider congressional action if their answers were
unacceptable.

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), also a member of both committees, cited
years-old figures from his alma mater, Stanford University, that 80 percent
of the campus' bandwidth was being used for file sharing. "To say file
sharing on university campuses does not drive up the cost of education is
just flat-out false," he said. "The more we can do to have the technology to
keep this from happening in the first place, the better off students will
be."

The cost of file sharing
Charles Wight, associate vice president for academic affairs and
undergraduate studies at the University of Utah, said his school had saved
$1.2 million in bandwidth costs and about $70,000 in personnel costs since
implementing a two-pronged approach to rooting out file sharing three years
ago. He said the university's information security office employs a
combination of continuous monitoring of its networks for high-bandwidth
users and runs software made by a company called Audible Magic, which is
designed to match and block the exchange of copyrighted files through audio
"fingerprinting," on its student residence networks.

Arizona State University Chief Technology Officer Adrian Sannier reported
success in reducing illegal file sharing through a similar approach. In
response to a question posed by Hall, all the university representatives
present said they believed such technological solutions were part of the
answer to reducing illicit file sharing but that they're far from foolproof.
(In addition, file sharing can be used for non-infringing purposes at
universities and corporations, as the U.S. Supreme Court noted in the
Grokster case.)

Some officials had more favorable views about filtering and blocking. Greg
Jackson, chief information officer for the University of Chicago, said his
school had tried to block file-sharing traffic using various methods, but
when one program failed, it took down all of the university's Internet
traffic with it, stumping the technical staff for "a while."
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Jackson and Illinois State University dean of libraries Cheryl Elzy also
blamed the entertainment industry for some of the piracy problems.

"So long as the right thing remains more daunting, awkward and unsatisfying
than the wrong thing, too many people will do the wrong thing," Jackson
said, referring to the digital rights management technology used widely in
legally purchased music files.

Both Elzy and Jackson endured grilling from some committee politicians who
accused them of not taking seriously the viability of technological
solutions.

"If we rely on technology too much, it's going to interfere with legal uses
of peer-to-peer technologies," Elzy said. Some of her own library files can
be quite large, she added, and "I'd like to not have those blocked."

CNET News.com's Declan McCullagh contributed to this report.