Colleges are spending a good deal of money to prevent students from downloading copyrighted music and movies, says a report released today. And with new requirements recently imposed on institutions of higher education by Congress, the report's author argues, the cost of fighting piracy could rise even further.
The report, "The Campus Costs of P2P Compliance," describes a study conducted by the Campus Computing Project, which surveys colleges about their use of information technology. The project's founding director, Kenneth C. Green, asked campus officials how much they now spend on two measures to cut illicit peer-to-peer file sharing that recent legislation to renew the Higher Education Act requires colleges to consider—legal music- and movie-downloading services, and "technology-based deterrents" to illegal activity (The Chronicle, August 8).
As it turns out, legal downloading services cost most colleges nothing. Fifty-nine of the 321 institutions that responded to Mr. Green's survey have licensing agreements with such a service, but only three said they actually pay for one. That's because the other 56 have no-fee agreements with services like Ruckus Network, a music and movie library that makes its money through advertising revenue.
Deterrents to piracy, on the other hand, can be costly. Private universities spent an average of $408,000 during the 2007 academic year on antipiracy efforts—about $105,000 on bandwidth-management and traffic-monitoring software, $159,000 on hardware, and $144,000 in additional costs, the study found. Public universities spent nearly $170,000 apiece, including $22,000 on software, $65,000 on hardware, and $83,000 in other expenditures.
Community colleges, which typically do not give students access to residential computer networks, ran up significantly lower costs fighting piracy: They spent an average of about $7,000 on software and $43,000 on hardware, says the report.
In addition to the hardware and software costs, Mr. Green says, institutions use considerable staff time "doing pro bono enforcement for the entertainment industry."
"The burden of peer-to-peer compliance falls primarily on campus IT personnel," writes Mr. Green in the report. "For example, in public doctoral universities, IT personnel spent, on average, 779 hours (approximately 19 person weeks or roughly two-fifths of a person-year on peer-to-peer issues."
Technology administrators, legal counsels, and student advisers at public and private universities all spend meaningful amounts of time developing educational programs about copyright, maintaining antipiracy software and hardware, and responding to cease-and-desist notices that identify pirated music and movies on campus networks, the Campus Computing Project concludes.
The new antipiracy measures mandated in the legislation to renew the Higher Education Act—which was signed by President George W. Bush in August—may not affect colleges that already have spent significant amounts of time and money on deterrents to file sharing, Mr. Green says. But institutions that have not noticed much illegal activity on their networks "may feel compelled to spend more money and time on peer-to-peer compliance," he argues in the report.
Mr. Green has criticized the entertainment industry for its aggressive campaign against campus piracy (The Chronicle, November 23, 2001), but he says the new report is driven by data, not demagogy.
"Clearly I'm a partisan on this," he said in an interview on Sunday, "but I try to do a fair framing of this issue."
