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07.07
Congress
Looks At Technology’s Role In Addressing Illegal
File-Sharing On University Campuses
By Juran Janus
In early June, the House Science
and Technology Committee held a hearing to
explore the roles that technology could play in
reducing the illegal file-sharing of
intellectual property on university and college
campuses. This is the most recent congressional
inquiry into the subject; during the 109th
Congress, similar hearings were
held by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on
Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property
and last September by the House Education and
Labor Committee.
According to the Science
Committee, growing numbers of college students
are using campus information systems to
illegally download and share copyrighted music
and movies through free peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing programs, such as eMule and LimeWire.
According to the Science Committee, in 2006, some 1.3 billion tracks were downloaded
illegally in the United States by college students,
compared with approximately 500 million legal
downloads.
“Illegal filesharing isn’t just
about royalty fees. It clogs campus networks and
interferes with the educational and research
mission of universities,” Science Chairman Bart
Gordon (D-Tenn.) told hearing participants. “It
wastes resources that could have gone to
laboratories, classrooms and equipment. And it
is teaching a generation of college students
that it’s alright to steal music.”
“Piracy of digitally available
media has become a large concern as more and
more intellectual and creative works are
available in easily transferred digital formats,
and access to high bandwidth networks has
spread,” added Ranking Member Ralph Hall (R-Texas).
In their testimonies, a panel of
five witnesses discussed their experiences with
two different types of technological measures
employed to prevent illegal filesharing:
traffic-shaping systems and network-filtering
systems. Traffic-shaping systems control the
speed of network transmissions based on where in
the network they originate and what computer
program sends them, discouraging illegal
file-sharing by making it slower and more
difficult. Network-filtering systems
identify and block specific transmissions
containing copyrighted material.
Dr. Charles Wight, Associate
Vice President for Academic Affairs and
Undergraduate Studies at the University of Utah, led
off the hearing by reporting that the university
uses two independent technology solutions on its
campus network to address the problem of illegal
file sharing. The first is continuous monitoring
of network traffic to identify high-bandwidth
users in all areas of campus. The second is a
network monitoring program called Audible Magic,
which detects and blocks transmission of
unencrypted copyrighted music and video
recordings from computers in the student
residence halls. Both systems have helped reduce
the volume of copyright abuse notices received
from the Recording Industry Association of
America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture
Association of America (MPAA) by more than 90
percent
and reduced the amount of staff time required to
deal with network abuse to 3 person-hours a
week. He cautioned, however, “It is important to
note that there is no software or other network
monitoring technology that can identify illegal
transmission of copyrighted material with 100
percent
reliability.”
Dr. Adrian Sannier, University
Technology Officer for Arizona State University,
reported that the university has successfully
utilized the CopySense Appliance, which works by
blocking the exchange of copyrighted content
while allowing legitimate files to transfer
unobstructed; treating the copyrighted material
as if it were a computer virus. While noting the
benefits of this approach, he noted that the
university is concerned about the rapid pace of
technological change, noting that “Peer-to-peer
services have evolved to defeat effective
counter-measures before, and it would be
foolhardy to believe that no further evolution
is possible. As long as this "arms race"
continues, universities will continue to be
called upon to spend scarce resources procuring
and deploying the latest technical
counter-measures and expending time and energy
in the protection of copyright at the expense of
the value-added application of emerging
technologies to the core missions of the
institution.”
Vance Ikezoye, president
and CEO of Audible Magic Corporation, the maker
of the Copysense application, described its
capabilities to the committee. He acknowledged
that no technology will ever be 100 percent effective,
but offered that “a solution does not have to be
100 percent to be effective and make a difference on
campuses.”
Ikezoye also addressed related
privacy concerns, noting that, “We have designed
the CopySense system so that it can be
configured to restrict access to information in
a manner consistent with a university’s privacy
policy." Also, he explained that the
application operates much like anti-virus
products or spam filters in that the “system
matches only copyrighted items in a database
that are transferred over known public file
sharing networks. All other communications, such
as e-mail and Web traffic, go by unimpeded and
without inspection.”
In her testimony, Cheryl Asper Elzy, Dean of University Libraries at
Illinois State University, challenged the
hearing’s focus on technology solutions, noting
“with all respect — technology is only a means
to an end in a whole lot of ways. Illegal
peer-to-peer downloading is NOT solely a
technology problem. It doesn’t have a
“technology” solution alone. The discussion
should be about legal access to materials and
other information resources. We should be
talking about connecting users with the right
tools. An added focus has to be on education and
changing behaviors.”
Elzy described
the university’s multi-faceted approach to
combating piracy on campus, dubbed the Digital
Citizen Project, which employs an emphasis on
education and awareness both among university
students and at the K-12 level, coupled with
appropriate use of self-monitoring tools and
enforcement.
Closing the hearing, Dr. Gregory
Jackson, vice president and chief information
officer for the University of Chicago, testified
that market shortcomings are a principal driver
of infringement, noting that “media producers
provide and protect their online wares
inconsistently, incompatibly, inefficiently,
inconveniently and incompletely.”
Jackson also cautioned the Science
Committee that “network-based anti-infringement
technologies fail within high-performance
networks, and eventually they will fail more
generally,” and warned that placing technological
obstacles to targeted behavior “have only
limited and transitory effects.”
Jackson concluded by noting, “When the
problems that arise are about personal and
organizational behavior, about the rights and
responsibilities of community members and
citizens, the only successful, robust way to
address them is with social, rather than
technical tools. We must educate people to
understand why certain behaviors are
counterproductive for their own community or
economy. If we — owners, publishers, transmitters
and users — do that together, collective good will trump
individual malfeasance. When we instead restrict
behavior technologically, we get nothing but an
arms race we can’t win.”
When asked
whether technology could completely stop illegal
file-sharing, the witnesses unanimously agreed
that technology alone cannot stop piracy.
Instead, the witnesses promoted a mixed suite of
solutions including education, legal
file-sharing alternatives, along with
technological deterrence.
Copies of the hearing charter
and testimonies are available online at:
http://science.house.gov/publications/hearings_markups_details.aspx?NewsID=1846
Juran Janus writes
about policy issues for IEEE-USA Today's
Engineer. Comments may
be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.
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