[Infowarrior] - Universities Baffled By Massive Surge In RIAA Copyright Notices

[Richard Forno]

Universities Baffled By Massive Surge In RIAA Copyright Notices
By Ryan Singel EmailApril 30, 2008 | 9:42:08 PMCategories: Copyrights and
Patents  

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/04/riaa-sends-spik.html

In the last 10 days, universities around the country have seen a 20-fold
increase in the number of filesharing takedown notices from the recording
industry, in an unexplained spike that seems focused on colleges in the
Midwest.

The spike is not matched by an increase in actual file sharing.

Indiana University says that starting on April 21, the Recording Industry
Association of America began sending 80 legal notices a day to the
university. Typically, the university handles less than 100 such notices a
Digital Millineum Copyright Act notices a month from the RIAA, the Motion
Picture Association of America and HBO combined.

The DMCA notices include information about a specific IP address, file
sharing protocol and named infringing file.

IU tech staff compare those details against the university's logs to make
sure that the allegations are accurate, according to Mark Bruhn, an
associate vice president of Indiana University's IT department.

But many of these notices don't correspond to entries in traffic logs, which
also don't show any overall increase in file sharing, Bruhn said.

"We are not sure now what we have is an allegation of copyright infringement
or an allegation of possible future illegal behavior," Bruhn said."The whole
thing is very concerning, to be frank, we don't know why they are doing this
and I'm not sure they know what they are doing."

"They in fact can't know if the files being offered are actually the
protected works of their clients -- how would they know if they didn't
download and open them?" Bruhn said.

Indiana University isn't alone in seeing a spike, according to Mark Luker a
vice president of higher education techonology advocate Educause, who has
heard that universities around the country are seeing the same spike.

"Universities are getting as many notices from the RIAA in one day as what
they would typically get from all content owners in a month," Luker said.

University of Chicago has also seen a recent surge, its CIO confirmed to
THREAT LEVEL.

Meanwhile, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported Wednesday that George
Washington University and University of Cincinnati are also reporting spikes
beginning two weeks ago.

For its part, the RIAA denies there's anything new to the letters, sending
along a stock statement to THREAT LEVEL.

"We are always making an effort to more effectively and efficiently detect
infringing activity on the Internet, as we are continuously  looking for
ways to improve our ability to find and act on incidences of theft online.
Having said that, there's been no change in our procedures."

RIAA spokeswoman Liz Kennedy did not respond to a follow-up request to
explain the surge and IU's analysis that notices were being sent without
proof of infringement.

Luker finds the RIAA's position difficult to believe.

"It is for us hard to accept that students are multiplying their
infringements by 30," Luker said.

Bruhn concurs.

"The RIAA says it is not new, but clearly it is," Bruhn said.

University of California at Berkeley's chief information officer Shel
Waggener confirmed he'd heard of the spikes and suggested there was a
political purpose driving them.

"Public universities are in a unique position since the industry puts
pressure on us through state legislatures to try to impose what are widely
considered to be draconian content monitoring measures and turn us into tech
police forces in support of a specific industry," Waggener said.

The RIAA is also backing legislation in states such as Illinois and
Tennessee that would require schools that get a certain number of notices to
begin installing deep packet monitoring equipment on their internet and
intranets, according to Luker.

"The number of DMCA notices that are sent to a university vary wildly from
one day to the next, and no one, including the federal government knows how
they send them out or what criteria they use," Luker said.  "It is not
reasonable in any way to use those counts as a basis for government
actions."

IU's Bruhn says the school has typically treated the notices seriously,
requiring first time offenders to take an online tutorial about copyright,
suspending second time offenders from the university's net for two weeks and
indefinitely suspending anyone caught a third time.

Bruhn, Waggener and Luker all downplayed the amount of file sharing occuring
on campus networks these days, saying that the MPAA, for instance, radically
overestimated how much movie piracy was attributable to college students.
For more than two years, the industry claimed that more than 40 percent of
illegal movie downloads came from college students -- costing the industry
billions of dollars. Then in January of this year, the estimate was reduced
to 15% for college-aged students, and only 3% occurring on campus networks.