The Chronicle: 3/21/2003: Film Studio Sends Hundreds of Letters to Colleges, Alleging Illegal Downloading

By BROCK READ

Campus technology directors are scrambling anew to comply with copyright laws after a major movie studio stepped up its pressure on students who download movies off the Internet by issuing an unprecedented number of cease-and-desist orders.

On February 28, Universal Studios lodged e-mail complaints with an unknown number of institutions, citing the IP addresses of machines on which it says films under the company's copyright were shared illegally. Campus administrators who traded reports in an e-mail discussion forum said the lists of machines were lengthy.

The University of Maryland at College Park was notified of 155 offending computers, while the University of Wisconsin at Madison was asked to investigate activity on 127 machines. Universal representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

The e-mail notifications were far more extensive than those that record and movie studios have previously sent to colleges. On an average day, Maryland receives allegations about only two or three computers being used for illegal downloading of copyrighted material, according to Rodney J. Petersen, Maryland's director of information technology planning and policy.

College computing officials said that complying with so many cease-and-desist orders is a massive task because officials must respond individually to each one. Network administrators must first track the IP addresses to specific computers and ask the machines' owners whether they have been downloading files illegally. Many admit that they have. But computing officials remain wary of disciplining owners whose computers might have been used by friends or breached remotely.

At Maryland and Wisconsin, officials provide accused offenders with information on copyright law and campus fair-use policy, and present them with Universal's cease-and-desist directives.

"It has been a lot of work for us," said Brian Rust, a spokesman for Wisconsin. Mr. Rust said that by the afternoon of February 28, the university had tracked and contacted the owners of only 12 of the 127 machines cited by Universal.

While some of the cited computers belong to students using the campus network, others are probably machines run by faculty and staff members, according to Mr. Rust.

The cease-and-desist orders came as a surprise to technology officers, who said they received no advance notification of Universal's plans, either from the studio or from the Motion Picture Association of America. In December, the Recording Industry Association of America sent an e-mail message to Graham B. Spanier, president of Pennsylvania State University at University Park, to announce plans to intensify enforcement of copyright policies, but information-technology officials said the promise had been largely unrealized.

Mr. Rust said that colleges may now have to treat movie downloading with the same focus as they do music file-sharing. "Universal is just one studio, so certainly other studios may follow suit," he added.

http://chronicle.com
Section: Information Technology
Volume 49, Issue 28, Page A35

Easy-to-print version

E-mail this story