Law: File Sharing

Latest news:A spike in summonses

And a backgrounder:

In the past, one associated bootlegged films with poor sound quality, off-center images and the occasional silhouette of a fellow moviegoer coming in late. Today, movies still in theaters can be found and downloaded online. The quality is high and the costs low. It is all a part of the relatively new wave of digital piracy that is making entertainment industry CEOs sweat. The potential loss of profit has demanded the involvement of the government, which has gone to great lengths to crack down on illegal downloading. (Recording Industry Association of America, 2006)
The first online file-sharing program to receive significant attention from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) was Napster in 1999 (“Filesharing”, 2005). Created by college dropout Shawn Fanning, it was a peer-to-peer program. Peer-to-peer file sharing services are especially fast and efficient for downloading audio and video files because they depend on the computing power of users, not the server. Multiple files can be downloaded from multiple locations without the large amount of traffic slowing the server down. (“Peer-to-peer”, 2007)
The legal battle that ensued between Napster and the RIAA resulted in Napster 2.0 and the current Napster To Go. Napster To Go offers over 3 million downloadable songs for a monthly rate. (“Filesharing, 2005) The compromise was a victory for the RIAA.  Grokster, a similar peer-to-peer program, was shut down after a Supreme Court decision in June. The case was reminiscent of Sony Corporation of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. in which the Supreme Court’s decision ensured that VCRs, CD burners, iPods and all other technology capable of copyright infringement may be produced and sold by their respective companies without facing lawsuits. With the Grokster decision came not a negation of the former verdict but a new set of guidelines based on the idea of ‘inducement’:
"[O]ne who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties." (MGM v. Grokster, 125 S. Ct. 2764 (U.S. Supreme Court, June 2005)
The recent Internet file-sharing cases have created a lot of grey area. For higher education institutions, this is an important issue because universities have been heavily targeted by the RIAA and the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America). These organizations have found that a large percentage of illegal downloading takes place on college campuses. Schools with high-bandwidth networks can be especially popular targets. Lawsuits have been filed against hundreds of students for copyright infringement, and the pressure on colleges to police their own campuses is great. (Brock and Young, 2006; Morris, 2006)
It is not hard to imagine that many university IT administrators are becoming frustrated and overwhelmed by the RIAA/MPAA’s demands. The task of monitoring an entire campus network is no small one, and not necessarily associated with the normal responsibilities of university administration. There have even been complaints against the RIAA/MPAA and the overly extreme measures they’ve gone to, such as the prosecution of what in the past would have been deemed fair use. (Read, 2006) Nonetheless, with the government behind them, these ultimatums must be honored to a reasonable degree, no matter how unclear ‘reasonable’ may be. There are some basic steps, however, which many schools have taken with positive results.
--- by Jim Castagnera