Big Ban on Campus

On Sunday, 1,200 incoming Yale University students will listen to a half-hour lecture outlining all the things they can do with the school’s formidable computer network.

That will be followed by another half-hour presentation about what they shouldn’t do online -- in particular, downloading free movies and music.

Pressured by Hollywood and the record industry, colleges and universities across the country are welcoming students this month with warnings against pirating. Schools also are slapping tighter restrictions on the use of campus Internet connections.

“Before, people were in kind of a fantasyland,” said H. Morrow Long, director of security for Yale’s computer network. “They didn’t think the Internet had anything to do with the law. They thought it was a law-free zone. Now I think some of them are aware, and we’re trying to make them seriously aware.”

Campus administrators are responding to both external and internal forces.

Record company executives have served several campuses with subpoenas seeking the identities of students who allegedly have bootlegged songs online, earning the schools unwanted publicity. At the same time, campus computer networks are clogged by students making free copies of music, films and software.

College students have been among the most enthusiastic users of file-sharing systems such as Kazaa, which people use to copy millions of audio and video files stored on computers around the world. Many college networks are 10 to 100 times faster than the speediest home Internet connection, making it far easier for students to download large media files.

Entertainment companies have responded with an intense effort to root out campus piracy and pressed college leaders to do more.

Administrators at UC Berkeley, for instance, say they have been overwhelmed by letters from entertainment companies demanding that their works be removed from the campus network. Berkeley received 163 notices last year, up from just 10 two years earlier.

So now schools are cracking down. At Berkeley, a student who wants a free Internet connection in his dorm room must attend an orientation session that includes a warning about the legal troubles file swapping can bring.

Such warnings have a new edge this semester. Instead of speaking about hypothetical situations, Yale’s Long said he would be telling students about the four students -- at Princeton University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Michigan Technological University -- sued in April by the record industry.

Each of the four paid $12,000 to $17,500 to settle claims that they violated music copyrights by offering songs on campus file-sharing networks.

But how many students listen to finger-waving lectures about anything?

For students who live on campus and need Berkeley’s connection, the warnings of disabling Internet access are “definitely a credible threat,” said Sarthak Shah, a 20-year-old senior and economics major. But for the most part, “the basic take from my peers is that no one is really scared legally to download music, movies or burn CDs. On campus, people won’t download files because of the credible threat, but they’ll end up doing it through other means.”

Jeanne Smythe, director for computing policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said that some students ignore the variety of warnings UNC provides about piracy but that “very, very few” are repeat offenders. “They know if they do it again they’re going to get in trouble,” she said, adding that the possible penalties include expulsion.

Colleges have been targeted for lawsuits too. In April 2000, the heavy-metal band Metallica sued Yale, USC and Indiana University for enabling students to copy songs through the Napster file-sharing service. All three quickly satisfied the band by blocking students’ access to Napster.

Last October, representatives of the music and movie industries sent letters to 2,300 college and university presidents, urging them to police their networks and educate students about the legal risks of violating copyright. They also joined top administrators from five universities in a task force to discuss ways to address piracy.

Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel of the American Council on Education and a member of the task force’s staff, said it had been “patently clear” to schools for almost a year that the “massive downloading” of movies and music can impede students and faculty in using their networks for academics. But changing students’ behavior, he said, is unlikely to be easy.

“We have to reverse probably close to a decade of home downloading to the applause of peers and the tacit approval of parents. It takes some effort. You can’t simply say, ‘Well, what you’ve been doing for the past decade is wrong.’ You have to explain.”

Few schools have been willing to cut off access to file-sharing networks altogether, but many constrict the flow of data to and from those networks -- a technique called “bandwidth throttling.” At Yale, for example, students connecting to file-sharing networks find that searching for and downloading items are as slow as if they were using a dial-up modem.

Administrators at Berkeley will shut down heavy free-music traffickers more quickly than before. The campus allows students to trade files amounting to 5 gigabytes per week -- the equivalent of about four movies, 200 songs and 1,000 e-mails. Administrators say they will warn violators of the limit just once before disabling their Internet connections. Under the old policy, students received two warnings.

With the rising volume of legal notices from the entertainment industry, “the policies and the enforcement procedures we had in the past just weren’t working for us,” said Dedra Chamberlin, Berkeley’s manager of residential computing.

Although major record companies and film studios have been stepping up the pressure on campuses, Chamberlin suggested that they may not be cracking the culture of a generation of students who have been trading music online since they were freshmen in high school.

“Students are used to being able to get any song they want anytime,” she said.

“It feels like the recording industry is holding on to this business model of selling a hard CD at a price students don’t want to pay. But the more aggressive they are in trying to hold on, the more emboldened tech-savvy students are going to be to find ways around it.”

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Tougher restrictions

UC Berkeley is one of many colleges toughening its restrictions on online file swapping by students.

Administrators nationwide have been under pressure from the entertainment industry to prevent students from trading pirated songs and movies through colleges’ high-speed Internet connections.

But campus administrators say they are reluctant to limit students’ legal use of the Internet.

Here are some of the measures recently instituted by UC Berkeley:

* Students who want a free Internet connection must attend an orientation session at which university staff members will emphasize the laws regarding peer-to-peer file sharing.

* Students may not upload or download more than 5 gigabytes of data per week -- the equivalent of 1,000 e-mails, 200 songs and four movies.

* Starting this year, students will lose their Internet connections if they exceed the limit twice. Under the old policy, students could break the limit twice before potentially losing their connection.

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Source: Times research