Illinois State University's introduction of a file-transfer tracking system, known as the Digital Citizen Project, is the latest step in the struggle of entertainment industry groups and colleges to stem the flow of illegal downloading on campuses. The initiative was undertaken amid debate over the increasingly thorny question of how much responsibility colleges and universities have to stem illegal downloading.
The Digital Citizen Project is a program designed to "research, discover, and establish best practices for shifting consumption of media on university campuses from pirated content to legitimately licensed content," according to the project's Web site. The project employs a variety of tactics to try to curb illegal downloading, including educating students through an awareness campaign, increasing university self-monitoring and enforcement, providing free and legal music services and rewarding students who don't download illegally.
The project was launched in response to a "sharp uptick in the number of violation notices that (Illinois State) got from the Recording Industry Association of America," said Mark Walbert, Illinois State's associate vice president for academic information technology.
Cheryl Elzy, the dean of university libraries, conceived the project as a way to gather data about student downloading. The real turning point for the decision to go forward with the project, Walbert said, occurred when four Illinois State students were subpoenaed. "That really galvanized our attention on the issue," he said.
In late 2006, Illinois State officials approached the entertainment industry with their offer of cooperation. "When we went to Washington and asked (the RIAA) what we could do, they literally - literally - sat at the table and said nothing. ... And later on, as there got to be more talking, they realized, 'Nobody's ever asked us that before,' " Walbert said. Ultimately, the university received funding for the project from the music industry.
The findings of the Digital Citizen Project - though incomplete - have served to "get enough data to put numbers behind what we just had as ideas before," Walbert said. The project discovered that a "startling" 60,000 "original transfers" occurred in April at Illinois State, according to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
One finding that Walbert described as a "surprise" was that the majority of the file transfers did not carry signatures or meta-data that could mark them as indisputably illegal. "We have discovered that there's a great deal of material that's being shared that we have no idea what it is," Walbert said. "The industry needs to find a way to watermark these songs so those transfers can be tagged."
Walbert said university officials will conduct a more detailed analysis of the data this summer.
The project was not a simple clampdown on illegal downloading or an end of peer-to-peer software, Walbert said. "I really hope what it does is broaden the conversation away from just saying, 'find a technology solution that just kills it.' We can block peer-to-peer transfers in different ways - and Illinois State has for years - but there are a lot of legitimate uses, and those are growing. So we find that tool to be a little too blunt."
Walbert said another problem is that the market is always slow to adapt to technology changes, and the music industry is no exception. "I would like them, too, to spend more time on how to educate students about what the issues are, really," he said.
"My big thing has always been the underlying behavioral issue is what matters. ... We need to do a lot better job of educating students and others that, actually, you are stealing from people and that's something you should be aware of."
Connie Sadler, director of information technology security at Brown's Computing and Information Services, agreed with Walbert. "One of my concerns is that I still hear from students who seem surprised when there's a complaint that comes in alleging illegal downloading," she told The Herald. "I would like to know what we can do to better educate students, particularly around the risk associated with running peer-to-peer applications."
Brown has received 12 to 15 notices from the RIAA so far this semester - a normal number of notices - and has no plans to introduce anti-piracy technology. When a student is the subject of RIAA complaints, University officials activate a process of warnings and dean's hearings, Sadler said.
"I don't think that Brown is really planning on changing its policy any time soon," Sadler said.
Sadler explained that the Internet at Brown is run essentially as two networks. "We manage the Brown campus network, which is reserved for academic applications, and we manage what we call the residential network, and that's the network that the students are attached to... We really reserve most of our bandwidth for applications that are required for academic work."
"We see ourselves more as an Internet provider for the residential network. We don't see ourselves as monitoring what goes on in and out of that network," Sadler said.
Student attitudes regarding illegal downloading and preventative or punitive measures taken by the University and the entertainment industry vary.
A sophomore, who requested anonymity, admitted to downloading content illegally. "It's strange how little I feel guilty about actually stealing music, because I have thousands of dollars worth of it," the student told The Herald.
The sophomore said she had once received notification from the University informing her that a movie studio had contacted Brown officials after she attempted to download a recently released movie.
"The e-mail said (the University) was planning to suspend my Internet account until I said I would never do it again, but I don't think they ever did, so I'm not sure what the point of it was," she said.
The student said she thought it was the responsibility of the entertainment industry, not the University, to monitor and take action against illegal downloading. She added that the only thing that would convince her to stop downloading illegally would be if she were actually prosecuted.
