Colleges aggressively cracking down on downloads of music
USA TODAY

College administrators, under pressure from record labels, have dramatically stepped up efforts to wean students from downloading copyrighted music and movie files via high-speed university networks.

''More schools are becoming more aware of the seriousness of the problem and trying to figure out ways to deal with it,'' says John Vaughn, executive vice president of the Association of American Universities. ''Administrators see this as a multidimensional problem -- bad press, bandwidth, educational and ethical responsibilities to teach. It's a real struggle to reduce illegitimate activity without causing a total breakdown of the system.''

The Recording Industry Association of America has been working with universities since last fall to increase anti-piracy efforts, including letters and e-mails to students about copyright theft, and to make punishments more severe (specifically, loss of Internet access) if students are caught using the system for uses other than homework.

But a few weeks ago, the RIAA took the battle to a dramatic new level by filing lawsuits against students at Princeton, Michigan Technological University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, marking the first time the industry had gone after individually identified Net users. These students weren't users of the most popular pirate download program, Kazaa, but rather had posted internal sharing sites on university servers. At $150,000 per song, each student is potentially liable for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.

''Right now, there's near-universal agreement among university presidents that we'd like to rid our campuses of illegal use of peer-to-peer file sharing,'' says Graham Spanier, president of Penn State University, who chairs a committee with RIAA president Cary Sherman aimed at curbing piracy. ''It's costly for us, in terms of tying up huge amounts of bandwidth -- but what our students are doing when they pirate copyrighted material is not only illegal, but also immoral.''

Penn State recently temporarily took Net access from 220 students for downloading. Harvard instituted a new policy earlier this month removing access for one year if, after a warning, a student returns to downloading. And just last week, in Australia, a site run by three college students was shut down by local police for copyright violations. Most of the music and movie files on the site were hosted by university computers.

Campuses are small places. Yale's Derek Lomas says he is a friend of a friend of Princeton's Daniel Peng, one of the four students being sued by the RIAA. (Peng's attorney hasn't responded to calls.) Still, Lomas says the reaction among fellow students to the suits and crackdowns has been mild. ''I know students who won't touch the download sites anymore because they're worried about legal repercussions, but I also know sharing and CD burning is as popular as ever.''

Princeton senior Yashih Wu just did her economics thesis on whether campus students would be willing to pay for a legal online music system. Despite the stated defiance from students in the past, some 46% of the students she surveyed said yes, while 27% said no. Wu says current services such as Pressplay and MusicNet don't have enough content to satisfy students, and their pricing plans are too complex, with none offering one price for unlimited songs.

''College students have gotten used to unlimited music downloading, and it's not going to be something they'll want to give up easily,'' she says.

The services are not well marketed, she found: Some 40% of her 679 respondents didn't even know legal services existed.

The college crackdown is not universal. Labels' efforts at more effective policing ''run flat into University of California policies against invading privacy,'' says UC-Berkeley associate vice chancellor Jack McCredie. ''We don't read people's mail or snoop on what they do on the Net.''

The university does respond to written notices received from the labels, as required by law. About 100 students have been contacted about their activities since fall. ''Most do a mea culpa and say, 'I didn't realize I was breaking the law,' and stop,'' he says. ''The system works.''

Charles Phelps, provost of the University of Rochester, echoes what many college administrators are saying: that the record industry needs to come up with a business model that lets the schools pay a flat license fee for students' downloading activities -- in effect, to tie a music fee into the tuition ''the same way we license Internet access to read journals from anywhere on campus,'' he says.

Lomas, 21, thinks the answer lies in letting students ''stream'' music from school servers, much like radio, since streamed music can't be copied, and therefore, he believes, doesn't violate copyrights.

Another possible solution being advocated by Spanier is software that automatically detects unauthorized music file sharing, similar to workplace software that filters porn. But Phelps has concerns about that: ''Such devices have a potential for invading privacy, and that makes me very nervous.''

''We have a cultural problem,'' says UC-Berkeley's McCredie. ''The students don't believe this is theft. They wouldn't walk out of a record store with 20 stolen CDs, but downloading on the Net is OK. And they're doing it long before they get to the university, from home. We're all not doing a good enough job educating them about intellectual property.''