The issue: universities have high-speed Internet connections as well as a concentrated population of music lovers (i.e., students). This combination has made college campuses a target of legal action by copyright holders, most notably the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), who claim that their copyrighted materials are being illegally shared (in fact, universities account for only an estimated 16% of the total number of illegal files shared).

"File sharing itself is not illegal," explains Jan Carmikle, an analyst for the UC Davis Business Contracts office, who is also an attorney. "It's not illegal to have KaZaA or Morpheus on your computer. The problem is in how you use them."

And how they are used, according to the RIAA, is for online sharing of copyrighted works - particularly music and movies -- without the permission of the copyright holder. Over the past couple of years, the RIAA has issued hundreds of "take-down" notifications to the UC campuses of alleged copyright violations, demanding that they remove illegally shared materials from their servers. This summer the RIAA escalated its efforts by serving over 1,100 subpoenas to many Internet Service Providers, including one to UCLA and another to UC Berkeley, in an attempt to find out the identities of alleged copyright infringers. Using this information, the RIAA sued over 300 individuals, including students, in the summer and fall.

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), universities, because they provide Internet access, handle the complaints of copyright violations allegedly committed by students, staff, and faculty. The UC system has developed policies and procedures for complying with the DMCA provisions, and has worked closely with the campuses to implement them. In recent months, UC has repeatedly reiterated its belief in the principles of copyright as a tool for encouraging innovation and creativity and its commitment to upholding copyright laws.

"A significant producer and consumer of intellectual property, the University has a profound interest in upholding copyright law and will continue to work to find innovative and effective solutions, including ongoing educational efforts, that meet these complex challenges," states a recent memo that was sent to the campuses from the Office of the President.

The DMCA & Copyright Infringement

The University, under the DMCA, is considered the Online Service Provider (OSP) for its students, staff, and faculty. As such, it is given shelter from liability for illegally shared material on its networks as long as, among other requirements, it expeditiously removes or blocks access to allegedly infringing material of which it is made aware. The UC system has adopted policies and procedures for complying with this "safe harbor" provision of the DMCA.

Basically, this is how it works: when copyright holders become aware of what they believe to be illegal uses of their materials, they send a notification to the OSP (in this case, the University) that includes the IP address of the violating computer, the title of the copyrighted work, and the date and time of the alleged infringement. The University correlates the IP address with the user of the computer at the time and date specified, and as appropriate to the situation and within the legal boundaries of the DMCA and privacy protection laws, it deals with the offender according to established processes and UC policies. For repeat offenders, the DMCA requires that the University terminate their online services, at least temporarily. The entire process is handled internally, with the copyright holder never learning the identity of the alleged offender.

A claimant can obtain more information, however, by serving the University with a subpoena under the DMCA, requiring that it reveal the identity of an alleged copyright violator. (This provision of the DMCA was recently challenged in the courts by a Boston College student but she dropped the case in late October. The American Civil Liberties Union says it will challenge the provision again, however.) The RIAA served a subpoena each to UCB and UCLA this summer, but it turned out that in both cases the offending computers were compromised by hackers. If the violations had been tied to actual people on campus, the University would have had to comply with the subpoena and give the RIAA the contact information, says Maria Shanle, an attorney with OP's Office of General Counsel. Under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) -- which does not protect against the subpoenas -- the University would have to give an alleged student infringer 10 days prior notice, so that he or she could fight the subpoena.

The UC campuses have all conducted various educational and outreach activities to make clear to students, staff, and faculty the University's commitment to upholding copyright laws and to warn them of the risks of violating them.

Last year, many of the campuses experienced a huge surge in notifications of alleged infringement. For example, UCD received 422, and UCB at least 163 (the number of alleged violations by students living in residence halls), up from just dozens in previous years. As a result, both campuses have adopted new strategies to discourage any infringing file sharing that may be occurring and to minimize the amount of staff time it takes to process the notifications. Both campuses have increased their awareness campaigns as well as implemented strict penalties for first-time violations.

For students living in residential housing at UCD, for example, a first-time violation results in their Internet port being blocked. They must remove the materials and go through Student Housing Judicial Affairs to get their Internet connection turned back on.

"We're even considering an automatic 10-day loss of Internet access upon first offense," says Jan Carmikle. "Each notification costs the university. By the time you add up all of the salaries, it costs a lot, and in a severe budget crisis, this is not how we want to spend our money."

UCB residence halls have adopted a similar approach after staff estimated that the cost of enforcing notifications for students alone was $15,000 last year. (Two-thirds of the notifications that the campus receives are for alleged violations by students living in residential halls.)

"Last year much of my time as Residential Communications Manager was dedicated to this," says Dedra Chamberlin, now a policy analyst at UCB. "We would notify individuals and ask them to take down copyrighted material as well as turn off file sharing on their computers. If we didn't hear back from them we would repeatedly contact them until we did get a response, which was taking a huge amount of our staff time. This year we decided to put the responsibility on the students to get in touch with us. We give them one business day to respond and if they don't, we disable their Internet connection. As soon as they respond, we turn their connections back on."

UCB also tries to discourage illegal file sharing by imposing a 5 GB-per week bandwidth cap on students. Sharing huge movie, music, and software files hogs bandwidth, slowing down the network for academic purposes and increasing costs for the University. Many of the other UC campuses, such as UCLA, take a slightly different bandwidth management approach by using "packet shapers" to cap total traffic within a cost boundary established by funds paid by the students as part of their housing costs. The packet shapers also prioritize network traffic types that are considered most educationally valuable. The effect is one of providing a lower bandwidth level for those files most commonly shared illegally, such as mp3s.

Stealth nature of file sharing programs

By now, with all of the publicity and legal action taking place, everyone should know that it is illegal to share copyrighted materials without permission. However, what people might not know is that they are actually doing it. It's obvious that you use a file sharing application to download files, but what is less known is that these applications are also used for uploading, meaning that other users can download files from any computer with the program installed.

"Most of the students who receive copyright violations allegations have some kind of file sharing software on their machine," says UCB's Chamberlin. "When they install those applications they don't realize that they are not set to close like a typical application. They stay open without users realizing it, which makes all of their files available for download by others every time they turn on their computer."

Another misperception is that file sharing activities are anonymous and won't be detected by copyright holders. However, copyright holders can easily employ technologies to sniff out files being illegally shared. Although by policy the University does not monitor its campus networks in an attempt to catch illegal file sharing, the RIAA does, and has not hesitated to act on the information they collect.

Education campaigns &policies

In light of the increase in notifications, the UC campuses have stepped up their copyright education efforts. The combination of an educational campaign and an effective first-notification policy seems to be working on many campuses and, according to campus administrators, has resulted in very few repeat offenders thus far.

UCLA significantly ratcheted up its education efforts last spring and summer. Among its strategies were to send campus communications to all students, publish articles in a variety of campus publications, put messages on cable TV in residence halls, and place banners on computer screens in labs in residential halls. Another common strategy that was employed this summer by UCLA and throughout the system was to devote time during orientation to the issue.

"This summer at new student orientation Student Affairs included a significant segment about file sharing," says Jim Davis, UCLA's Associate Vice Chancellor for Information Technology. "But what was more important was that they also included it in the parents' orientation. They found there was a lot of misinformation among parents and students about what this issue is about."

Education -- as opposed to banning file sharing applications altogether -- is an important strategy, says Davis, because many people still need to understand copyright and how the peer-to-peer applications work but especially because there are legitimate and growing academic uses of file sharing tools, such as for sharing software programs, publications, or music that students, staff, and faculty create, as well as for research purposes.

Davis says that UCLA's position is to balance the rights of the copyright holder with the rights and privacy of the university community, and believes that the response of the campus to date shows there is still room for a positive impact without resorting to more severe tactics.

"Peer-to-peer file sharing is here to stay," he says. "It's the way of the electronic world, if you will, and so it's not a question of avoiding peer-to-peer tools but how to work with them appropriately. This plays out currently in that as soon as you shut down one tool, people find another way to share. To deal with an individual tool is to chase an individual symptom."