In a university-wide e-mail on Monday, University Information Services and the Office of Student Conduct warned students of potential security risks, network obstacles and copyright violations posed by file-sharing programs such as Kazaa, Morpheus and Gnutella.
“Since the beginning of the academic year, students in residence halls have been reporting periodic network and Internet slowness despite the university’s increased Internet capacity,” the e-mail stated. “This is the most visible consequence of using peer-to-peer file sharing programs.”
Earlier this month, the presidents of organizations most affected by file-sharing – the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, the National usic Publishers’ Association and the Songwriters Guild of America – sent a letter to universities across the country, including Georgetown, notifying them of their responsibilities to restrict copyright infringement.
“The fact remains that pirating music or movies or other intellectual property is illegal,” Beth Ann Bergsmark, director of academic information and technology services, said. “There has been a dramatic rise in complaints to the university, and when the [university] is notified of such complaints, they pass the information to the Office of Student Conduct.”
Vice President of Information Services and CIO David Lambert said that universities have a responsibility to educate students about and punish students for copyright infringements, but that it is ultimately the students’ responsibility to refrain from illegally downloading copyrighted material.
“The issue of file-sharing is developing quickly into a political phase, and the recording industries are really going after this. It is part reality and part myth that the problem is college students,” Lambert said. “When you offer really fast Internet and large bandwidth capabilities, you give students the tools to easily download and upload lots of material. The recording industries are saying, `If you guys don’t deal with this, you are going to find yourselves in heavy litigation.’ The university has some protections from litigation, but students do not.”
Lambert said that Georgetown’s location in the nation’s capital adds greater scrutiny to file-sharing practices of students. “Sitting right here under the nose of these industries, who are based largely in Washington, D.C., makes Georgetown, George Washington [University], American [University] and other D.C. schools face higher levels of scrutiny by these industries,” he said. ” . It is very important for all students to understand the consequences of the university and its students giving political ammunition to these organizations for purposes of lobbying and introducing legislation by downloading copyrighted material illegally.” Lambert suggested student cooperation as key to preventing negative publicity for the university.
Downloading copyrighted material without the owner’s permission using file-sharing programs constitutes a violation of the university’s Computer Systems Acceptable Use Policy. “We’ve seen about 10 to 15 cases where students violated the copyright infringement rules in the acceptable use policy,” Bryan Kasper, assistant director for the Office of Student Conduct, said. “Most cases usually involve issues of students downloading movies off the Internet.”
Despite the increased use of file downloads, Lambert said the university does not plan to restrict students’ use of file-sharing programs. “Other schools are approaching more aggressive methods of monitoring and restricting student use of programs like Kazaa than we are,” he said. “Monday’s memo was meant to get people to think about a whole set of other issues pertaining to file-sharing programs, such as copyright violations and how it affects software on a system.”
If use of peer-to-peer programs continues, the RIAA may consider using technology to counter copyright infringements, according to Bergsmark. “The RIAA may begin developing programs that allow them to watch what students do. This is a serious privacy issue, and students have to begin to act responsibly. We need students to act responsibly or else we may see a significant decrease in privacy rights of Internet users,” he said.
Programs such as Kazaa have already jeopardized such privacy rights, Bergsmark said. “File-sharing programs deliver other programs to computers without the user even being aware that the program is being installed on their computer. Spyware programs track every click or response of the computer user without that person’s knowledge,” she said.
She also said that the use of file-sharing programs in which other users may store files on your computer could qualify you as a distributor of illegal programs.
Bergsmark said that the increased use of file-sharing programs has slowed down the network connection only in residence hall areas, where the port designated solely to peer-to-peer file sharing programs has become overloaded. Other ports, however, remain largely unaffected. “There is only one port that handles peer-to-peer file-sharing programs, so this reduces the strain on the overall network,” she said. “What we have seen is that dorms are becoming choke points where only a few people are using all of the bandwidth for a dorm area, and no one else can get on the Internet for that dorm as a result.”
Lambert said that although the university has expanded the bandwidth available to such programs, a cycle of negative feedback makes the problem difficult to solve.
“The more bandwidth is needed, the more we expand to accommodate this bandwidth, and the more bandwidth you offer, the more that is used,” he said. “The faster you expand your system, the more traffic you get. The builders of these programs are very creative, and it becomes very difficult to figure out how to manage this problem.”
