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University file sharing orientation { August 28 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56352-2003Aug27.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56352-2003Aug27.html
To Fight Music Piracy, Industry Goes to Schools
By Rebecca Dana
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 28, 2003; Page A01
Steve Morris, a 19-year-old American University sophomore and avowed music pirate, spent part of his summer teaching his grandmother how to use the popular file-sharing program Kazaa. He spent the other part as a freshman orientation leader, warning new students about the legal perils of online copyright violation.
"If the recording industry catches you downloading music," Morris said solemnly one recent morning to 50 incoming students, "you can be sued, and the university general counsel can't really protect you. And that'll cost you a lot of money. A lot lot lot of money."
Morris, who boasts of having amassed a playlist of nearly 1,500 illegally downloaded songs, didn't hear such warnings at his orientation a year ago. That was before the Recording Industry Association of America started slapping subpoenas on frequent file swappers. No one had to sit through mandatory programs about intellectual property law at American University, or at universities anywhere.
Any questions?
Well, just one, from a young man in the back row: "What would you suggest?"
"What would I suggest in terms of what?" Morris asks from the podium.
"In terms of a program to use to download music. What's the best?"
Morris fumbles: "I'm sure lots of your friends will know. . . . It's important to remember to make responsible decisions. . . . American University isn't going to stop you, per se. . . . I don't download music, of course. What do you want me to say?"
The students titter knowingly. They figure that anyone with a free, superfast Internet connection in his or her dorm room downloads music. It also seems that way to frustrated record executives who have watched industry profits tumble about 10 percent annually for the past few years, a decrease they blame on digital piracy rampant on college campuses.
Accordingly, the recording industry has decided to put more pressure to curb illegal file-sharing on college administrators, many of whom have traditionally resisted industry pleas to monitor or restrict student Internet use.
Last year, the RIAA formed a joint committee with university representatives to brainstorm ways of approaching the problem. Since many of the most enthusiastic offenders are freshman, the committee focused much of its energy on the late-summer orientation programs meant to acclimate 18-year-olds to college life. That, and the RIAA served more than 800 subpoenas in July to individual users -- admittedly in hopes of terrifying cash-strapped college students about what's known as peer-to-peer file-sharing software.
"Talk about peer-to-peer," says Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, "there's nothing like the news of some student getting subpoenaed to spread, peer-to-peer, among other students at a university" to help stop college kids from downloading music. In April the association filed lawsuits that cost four students at colleges in New York, New Jersey and Michigan between $12,000 and $17,000 each in settlements.
Despite the squashing of Napster a few years ago, hundreds of other file-swapping sites have emerged, allowing people to illegally share files at a rate of 2.6 billion a month, worldwide, by industry estimates. A committee task force considered 50 alternatives, including sites that would allow users to buy songs for a dollar apiece (Apple's iTunes, for example) and sites that would let students listen to any music they wanted free, but would make them pay to download songs and "own them forever," as Sherman says.
"We're trying to recapture a generation of students who have come to believe that music is free and you never have to buy it," Sherman says. To do that, "you want to give them access to music. You want them to get the distinction between having access to versus having ownership of music."
One committee recommendation was that universities include in student activities fees a subscription to legitimate music-listening or -downloading sites, in the same way some schools automatically charge students for expanded cable TV. Sherman says the style of enforcement should be left up to the schools. (At the Naval Academy in Annapolis in November, the response to students caught with illegally downloaded movies and music was to raid dorm rooms and strip 100 midshipmen of their government-provided computers.)
As a result of the committee's push -- including letters sent to 2,300 university administrators -- incoming freshmen have attended wildly different technology orientation programs around the country this month.
Some are of the just-say-no variety, which Sherman says is often the least effective. Steve Morris's lecture at American University last week was a version of that, except it included instructions from the information technology department "for students who are going to use Kazaa" anyway. Many colleges have suffered from sluggish connections caused by widespread peer-to-peer software use that clogs the network.
American University officials instruct students to limit bandwidth use by changing their computer settings to only download files and not upload them. High-volume downloaders will be investigated and required to "review the university's acceptable use policy," said university spokesman Todd Sedmak. Repeat violators might be kicked off the network permanently.
The university is also considering sending first-time violators to what Sedmak called "copyright school."
It's not exactly the discouragement that the recording industry might find ideal. And that's just the beginning of a new approach that varies from the most academic to the most practical to the most contrived -- none of which, many students say, will make a bit of difference.
"This isn't going to stop me from downloading anything," whispered Samuel Hicks, 19, an incoming American University freshman from Creston, Calif., at the start of Morris's presentation. "The servers are so decentralized, they'd have to do a lot of work to catch me."
Many universities are following a standard informational approach designed to limit their own liability. Technology officials train resident assistants to address the issue with freshman.
At Catholic University, students will have to take an online tutorial about file-sharing regulations before registering for classes. Or administrators hand out information packets with funny clip art, like the one given to Catholic University students with a police officer blowing a whistle and next to him the moral of the downloading-orientation story: "When you are pulled over to the side of the Information Superhighway, saying, 'I'm sorry officer; I didn't realize I was over the speed limit' is not a valid defense."
But just as often, it seems, the pedagogic impulse trumps the legal imperative. So you get Mike Ryan, a professor at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business, moderating an orientation seminar titled "Napster: Theft or Civil Disobedience?" which deals with the political economy of copyright policy, varying notions of ownership and the ethical implications of file-sharing technologies. Or the microeconomics class that Morris took as a freshman, in which students discussed the financial impacts of digital piracy. There was, he says, "pretty much a consensus: We don't care. CDs are so expensive and we're so poor."
(Yet, Morris, an international studies major, expresses some sympathy for the recording industry. "It's stealing. Honestly, they're right, and I almost feel bad for them. They're fighting a losing battle.")
And you get hastily updated philosophies of a liberal arts education, including this one from Craig Parker, the general counsel of Catholic University:
"We do a disservice to our students if they leave here without having learned the basics of intellectual property law."
In many ways, music piracy is to college campuses now what drugs and drinking have been to college campuses for decades: easy to do, as long as you're not doing it too much; easy to get away with, as long as you're not doing it too obviously; patently against the rules -- and all the more fun because of it.
Often, "universities will say, 'Look, this is a case of individual responsibility. We're not going to interfere with your freedom to experiment, whether it's with drugs or with illegal music,' " Sherman says. Hence the need to be creative in offering alternatives.
"Anything," he says, "would be better than what they were doing before."
Which was nothing. Josh Gardner, 23, a second-semester junior at American University, says he doesn't know a single person who doesn't download music, "so the RIAA has a pretty big job ahead of them."
"It's one of the major draws of college," Morris says. "They promote how fast their Internet is. To people our age, you know what that means; it means how fast you can download something."
Recently, American got wireless Internet, Morris notes with a laugh.
"So now, on top of everything else, we can download music in the bathroom, too!"
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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