ST. LOUIS, Mo. (U-WIRE) — College campuses across the country are becoming staging grounds for an imminent battle over digital copyright infringement as university officials fear lawsuits from recording and music industry officials.
The leaders of six higher education organizations recently sent a letter to more than 2,300 colleges and universities requesting stricter regulations on digital file-sharing technologies. Representatives of the music and recording industries sent out a similar request soon thereafter.
The letters assert that evidence of illegal distribution of copyrighted material through peer-to-peer and other digital file sharing connections on college campuses may result in lawsuits and legal action against universities that choose to remain impartial.
At Washington University, the service policy for Residential Technology states that “users should assume that material is copyrighted unless they know otherwise and not copy or disseminate copyrighted material without permission.”
Despite the policy’s warning, most students with a computer use some variation of the popular peer-to-peer programs, including KaZaA, Morpheus and Blubster.
In many cases, students have little idea what the actual problems are with file sharing and copyright infringement on campus.
“It seems like many students come to campus as freshmen thinking that downloading (and making available for uploading) music, games, software, etc. … is not a problem,” Residential Technology Services director Matt Arthur said. “Our hope is to educate new students so that they fully understand the ramifications of this issue.”
As Arthur explained, many people tend to mix up the problems of bandwidth and the content of that bandwidth.
“It’s not my business to look at what people are running over the bandwidth,” Arthur said. “File sharing programs are not, in and of themselves, a problem. … It is how these tools are used that can
become a concern, both from a bandwidth and copyright point of view.”