RIAA cracks down on MP3 piracy

Author: George Heinrichs

In recent years, colleges and universities across the country, including Middlebury, have been under siege by the music, television and film industries because of the use of their servers by students to illegally share files. In order to fight back against illegal downloading, some institutions have developed policies to prevent its spread on campus in order to protect both students and the institution.

According to Jeffrey R. Rehbach, the Designated Middlebury Copyright Agent, the music industry has "crawlers" looking for illegally shared files in specific networks, including Middlebury's. When the crawlers find an illegal download, an e-mail is sent by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to the College indicating the file shared, the time it was shared, the method of sharing and the user's IP address. If the e-mail is received within 24 hours of the activity, Rehbach then sends an e-mail to the current user of the IP address. The e-mail asks the user to "please check [their] computer to make sure it is not set up to share any copyrighted files over the Internet." It also tells the user how he or she can contact Rehbach or respond to a false accusation.

According to Rehbach, users may not even be aware they were sharing the file. If an individual is cited more than once by the RIAA, and he or she does not respond to the e-mail sent by the College, local Internet access is cut off in order to induce a response. By copyright law, the College has to inquire into any reported act of illegal file sharing, but as a service provider, it is also protected against lawsuits by the property holders.

While the College does try to stop illegal downloading where it can, it does not limit bandwidth, or try to stop the downloading of large files. Rehbach said that it is nearly impossible to tell legal from illegal downloads, and that it is more important for an intellectual institution to enable students to download what they need, rather than to make sure students are downloading what they should.

To ensure that academic and administrative activities receive priority over other traffic, the College utilizes traffic shaping on its computer network, a common practice among service providers. Traffic shaping became necessary after the rise of file sharing in the late 1990s.

"It was done in order to better restrict, not with the purpose of eliminating, but to prioritize," Rehbach said.

In the past few years the number of notices received by the College has varied. Forty notifications have been issued since September 2006, while 20 were issued in the last academic year (2005-2006). Seventy notifications were received in spring 2004, and during one period four years ago, as many as 10 notifications were issued per week. The offended parties change from year to year, and includes music studios and television networks. Most of the 20 complaints filed last year were from HBO concerning illegally shared TV shows.

Rehbach said that the introduction of a free Napster service provided to students in a deal between the College and Napster reached three years ago, along with the rise of iTunes and other legal file-sharing services has contributed to the drop in notifications over the past several years.

In an informal student survey conducted by The Middlebury Campus, 32 out of 70 students admitted to using illegal file sharing services, including Soulseek and uTorrent. Services like these are used to download as many as 243 million illegal files a month, according to Music United, an organization of many of the top recording firms and music associations. In the student survey, over 80 percent of those asked used iTunes. New software is being introduced, including Audible Magic, that can sort through ownership rights of material being shared and can prevent illegal sharing of owned material, without stopping the downloading of public material.

For many Middlebury students, the main concern is simply getting the music or movie downloaded. The end of the College's free Napster service may make this more difficult. One student, who requested that his name not be used, said "well, I just hope I stay connected long enough to finish getting that movie."