Piracy thriving on campuses
Sacramento Bee 1/22/07
But the threat of a letter in a permanent file doesn't hold as much sway as it used to. Complaints of copyright violations remain steady at campuses across California -- even going up in some cases.
"As far as illegal goes, it's not really a concern for most people -- it's like buckling up or not buckling up," said Meghan Moyle, 20, a UC Davis student from Reno.
The culture of downloading music without paying for it is so pervasive that two-thirds of college students say they don't care if the music is copyrighted, according to a 2006 study by the University of Richmond law school. The study concludes that the "confrontational approach" is not working.
Moyle said she has paid for about 60 percent of the music on her iPod. The rest of the tunes came from friends.
"You don't know who got it first," added Rex Pham, 21, a UC Davis student from San Jose, who estimates 70 percent of his music was passed along by friends or online forums.
Super-fast Internet connections in the freshman dorms at Davis made it even easier to share music, Pham said. "It takes a second to send a song. It takes three minutes to get a whole album."
Amanda Morgan, 20, a UC Davis student from Sacramento, recalled how dorm residents swapped music by setting up file-sharing programs on internal dorm networks dubbed "ourTunes," a play off of Apple's iTunes. "It's very easy to stay under the radar," she said.
Hundreds of the students ate lunch one recent afternoon around the Memorial Union at UC Davis -- a good half of them wearing the ubiquitous, cord-dangling iPod earbuds.
For now, the kids may have a leg up on the adults. But the media industry takes copyrights seriously.
Record companies, movie studios and video game companies routinely scan the Internet for their stolen wares and send complaints of alleged copyright violations to universities. Federal law requires universities to cut off Internet access of students who get caught for repeatedly downloading and passing along copyrighted material.
University of California campuses received more than 1,500 notices last year. California State University, with fewer students living in dorms, draws at least 700 copyright violation notices a year.
UC Davis fielded 310 complaints in the 2005-06 school year and is on pace for more than 400 this year.
"We're on track to shatter the record," said Jan Carmikle, an attorney and former programmer who oversees copyright issues for UC Davis.
University and industry officials said the number of copyright violations could reflect more aggressive monitoring. However, no one thinks that illegal downloading is dropping off.
"This isn't a situation that's going to change overnight," said Rich Taylor, a spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America.
He said there's still a "naive sense of invincibility that you can't be caught," but "the good news is that we see a very low rate of recidivism when folks are caught the first time."
Nearly all complaints are resolved with a warning to students, UC and CSU officials said.
In 2005, four unnamed UC Davis students were snared in a copyright lawsuit by the music industry, accused of copying and distributing songs from the Smashing Pumpkins to Smash Mouth. Songs by Eminem, Ja Rule, Linkin Park and Usher also were spotted by the recording industry's Internet watchers -- even some oldies by Pink Floyd and the Eagles. The claims against the UC Davis students were dropped a few months later, after the students presumably settled for several thousand dollars, campus officials said.
"They were very frightened," said Jeanne Wilson, director of student judicial affairs at UC Davis.
Kenneth C. Green, a visiting scholar at Claremont Graduate University who studies campus computing issues, said the targeting of students as "digital pirates" is misplaced. College dorms used to be one of the few places with high-speed Internet, but now millions of households can just as easily swipe music and movies through broadband connections provided by cable and telephone providers, he said.
"This effort to constantly villainize college students as the only culprits is just off the mark," Green said.
But college administrators remain under pressure. Faced with waves of increasingly Web-savvy students, they continue to ratchet up information campaigns about campus-downloading policies. And they've brokered deals with legitimate downloading services that offer free music to students. UC Davis and California State University, Sacramento, partnered with the Cdigix downloading service last fall and are beginning to make it available. Students can download music to a computer for free but not to a portable device like an iPod without paying for it. Movies and TV shows are not included.
The California Research and Education Network, the state's fiber optic backbone for K-12 schools, community colleges and public universities, also inked deals late last year with Cdigix and Ruckus to encourage legal downloading, said Janis Cortese, a spokeswoman for the network.
"The best way for us to address the issue is to redirect students' behavior," said Kris Hafner, a technology official at University of California system headquarters in Oakland.
Beginning today, any student with a valid university e-mail account will be able to use Ruckus Inc.'s ad-supported service.
But legal downloading services haven't kept up with students' interests and demands, Hafner said.
At campuses such as UCLA, which has subscribed to Cdigix and another service called Mindawn for nearly a year, complaints for copyright violations are up.
"I'm not seeing a direct cause and effect ... of students immediately jumping to it," said Kenn Heller, UCLA assistant dean of students.
UC and CSU officials have meetings scheduled in coming weeks with executives from the recording and movie industries.
"We're interested in knowing how we can provide services to our students that are more attractive," Hafner said. "We're kind of throwing the ball in (their) court."