Congress cracks down on university file sharing

Jana Kasperkevic
March 12, 2007
Article

Subcommittee talks with RIAA about illegal downloading on campus networks

Washington, D.C. - "Unfortunately, many schools have turned a blind eye to piracy," Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, said at a hearing concerning Piracy on University Networks. "Current law isn't giving universities enough incentive to comply."

During this hearing, held on Thursday, March 8, the overwhelming opinion was that the universities must take a more active role in reducing and eliminating peer-to-peer, or P2P, file sharing.

One of the main panel witnesses, Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, does not believe that schools are able to fail at controlling the piracy, and urged colleges to reclaim the integrity, efficiency and legal use of their networks.

In his written testimony, Sherman wrote that "a recent survey by the Intellectual Property Institute at the University of Richmond's School of Law found that more than half of college students download music and movies illegally."

"It doesn't have to be like this," he said. "We take this opportunity to once again ask schools to recognize the harm their inaction causes, to acknowledge the solutions that have been presented and to work with us productively to address a problem that affects us all." Sherman pointed out that the cost of the piracy on college networks includes billions of dollars in lost sales, thousands of lost jobs and lost career opportunities for talented writers and musicians.

Considering these costs, it is no surprise that last week the RIAA announced a new round of lawsuits, including 400 students and 13 higher education institutions. Sherman claims that the RIAA has asked school administrations for assistance in passing pre-lawsuit notices to the students so they can settle before the lawsuits are filed.

"The lawsuits have done more to increase awareness than anything else we've done, and numerous surveys have shown that the No. 1 reason that people have stopped illegal downloading is to avoid the risk of lawsuits," Sherman said. "It's sad that we have to do this, but it's been the most effective deterrent to date." Sherman is not the only one who believes that enforcing harsher rules might be the best solution at the moment.

"The statistics demonstrate that students engage in rampant piracy and while Congress has given universities many exemptions from copyright liability, it might be time to condition some of those exemptions on action taken by universities to address the piracy problem," said Berman.

Berman pointed out that it is ironic for universities to expect others to respect their ownership rights to their scholarly work, and disregard theft of the creative work of others. However, this might be a rushed judgment. According to the 2006 Campus Computing Survey, over 80 percent of colleges and universities have institutional policies that specifically address P2P file sharing.

Furthermore, John Vaughn, executive vice president of the Association of American Universities, stated during the hearing that higher education has undertaken various projects to reduce or eliminate illegal P2P file sharing on college and university campuses.

These projects include identifying helpful technologies, bringing together legitimate services and universities, educating students on the issue and even organizing a meeting of university officials, entertainment industry reps and network technology vendors to discuss and evaluate current technologies that block or filter illegal P2P file sharing.

"Higher education institutions and the national associations to which they belong take this continuing problem very seriously," Vaughn claimed.

Colleges, such as Purdue University, used the excuse that it takes too much effort to track down the offenders. "For those universities that don't want to get serious about it, the hammer is coming," warned Rep. Ric Keller (R-FL).