Students who share copyrighted music over the Internet and across College networks might face serious legal trouble if they continue to swap files.
While in the past the Recording Industry Association of America has sued companies -- like the now-defunct Napster -- that provided the software and infrastructure for file sharing, it said on June 25 that it would look to take legal action against individuals who share music.
And there may well be some teeth to the industry's threat. In the spring, the RIAA filed lawsuits against four college students across the nation. Their claim asked for $150,000 in damages for each violation of the copyrights they own. Since the industry wages that each person was responsible for thousands of violations, the total amounted to several million dollars per student.
In the end, the RIAA settled with each student for a comparative pittance, around $15,000. This is, nevertheless, quite a sum for a student to scrounge up.
Given the recent success of the recording industry's lawsuit against Verizon Communications to reveal the name of a major file-swapper, there is a greater possibility for such a lawsuit against a university, Computing Services spokesman Bill Brawley said.
According to a special peer-to-peer file-sharing website set up on the College web site, the College receives roughly 25 "take-down" notices per month from copyright owners. Based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the notices are forwarded to the violators and usually corrected, Brawley said.
In fact, Brawley said, at one point he received as many as "6 to ten DMCA takedown notices per week."
Dartmouth has yet to receive any such subpoena, Brawley said, but he added he remained wary of such a possibility. It might have the effect of changing the way Dartmouth monitors its network, he said, forcing a more active approach to finding file sharers.
"If the College receives a valid subpoena it would have to comply," Dartmouth counsel Bob Donin said.
Computing Services does not actively monitor network activity for illicit content, Brawley said, though if a student complains that the network is performing slowly then an investigation may be launched.
If unidentified network traffic -- that not already identified as normal Internet use -- is detected, Computing Services may "put a collar on it," restricting its bandwidth, Brawley said. The "collar" would restrict that form of network traffic unless it can be identified as a legitimate academic resource.
Non-academic use is classified as "recreational," Brawley said, so it is given lower priority on the network for traffic coming to and from the Internet. If a legitimate use is accidentally shut down, it will be restored if the affected student notifies Computing Services.
Over the weekend, many Dartmouth students who use the Bit-torrent software to download music and other resources from other users around the world noticed a slowdown in their downloads. Brawley said he was unsure if his coworkers had placed such a collar but that it may have occurred.
Peer-to-peer file sharing software like Bit-torrent takes up quite a bit of bandwidth, Brawley said, since it often requires the student's computer to act as a server and upload files as well as download them. This can easily overwhelm the network within a residence hall cluster, he said.
While Bit-torrent appeals to many because its users are in theory anonymous and untraceable by the recording industry, Brawley warned all students involved to be cautious.
"If the recording industry finds that your using it, they'll subpoena you," he said.
Computing Services has long restricted illegal downloading of copyrighted materials. In 1999 they placed restrictions on the use of Napster and WinMX, and during Winter term they forced the shutdown of the Direct Connect campus file sharing network.
