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Opinion
P2P Redux: New Twists and Turns
6/13/2008
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RIAA Notices on Upswing
This spring higher education campuses across the country were inundated with a 20-fold increase in the number of file sharing takedown notices from the recording industry. For example, at the University of Indiana, which typically sees 100 notices a month, the number jumped to 80 per day at the end of July. But they found that many of the notices didn't correspond to entries in traffic logs or show any overall increase in file sharing. Smaller institutions saw an increase as well. St. Cloud State University, where I had my first teaching job, reported that they went from around a dozen notices per year to four to six notices per week. Numerous campuses reported false positives (i.e. RIAA notices did not match up with any activity on the IP address in question) on the Educause Security Constituency Group listserv. So what's going on?
Mark Luker, an Educause vice president, learned that most of the notices were triggered by the presence of a file, whose distribution would be prohibited under copyright laws, in a shared folder on a person's computer (a "folder-based" notice) rather than evidence that such a file was actually distributed (a "transmission-based" notice). For a more complete discussion of this distinction and its implications for campuses see Luker's e-mail to the Security Constituent Group. Mark Bruhn, University of Indiana associate vice president of Information Technology, pointed out, "They in fact can't know if the files being offered are actually the protected works of their clients--how would they know if they didn't download and open them?"
Given that RIAA is backing legislation in states as Illinois and Tennessee to require that institutions that get more than a certain number of notices be required to purchase and use equipment to do deep packet monitoring, one has to wonder if the recent upswing in notices is nothing more than a last gasp effort on the part of the recording industry to preserve a failed business model.
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