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October 24, 2007, 04:34 PM ET
Antipiracy Campaign Still Causing Confusion
Seattle— Months after the Recording Industry Association of America became more aggressive in its nationwide crackdown on sharing of music files on campuses, there’s still plenty of confusion about how colleges should handle the wave of “pre-litigation notices” the trade group is asking institutions to forward to offending students. The topic was the subject of a packed session here Wednesday at Educause 2007.
Kent Wada, director of IT policy at the University of California, who led the session, was surprised by the size of the crowd. “I was worried no one would come,” he told the group.
But judging by the questions during the 50-minute session, an entire conference could be held on the subject. About a quarter of the 100 or so people in the room, mostly CIO’s from colleges, said they have received the RIAA notices. Of those, only four said they did not forward the notices to students.
Many at the session said they were uncomfortable with the position that the RIAA has put them in. Margaret Knox, CIO of the University of Texas system, encouraged her colleagues to separate the technology from the legal issues. For instance, she said that if a department store had videotaped a student shoplifting and then asked the college to identify that student, “we would say ‘very nice to meet you, but no.’”
Several other CIO’s complained that colleges have been targeted even though consumer Internet service providers like Comcast are much more of a hotbed of illegal peer-to-peer traffic. “We’re getting these notices because we’re easy targets,” said one CIO. “We don’t present a united front.”
There was also much discussion on how much time CIOs should spend educating students about the issue. One CIO said she didn’t have enough time to create education programs. Other CIOs said they believed it was part of the university’s mission, and thus their jobs, to teach students to become better citizens and to follow copyright laws. —Jeffrey Selingo
Audio: Jeffrey Selingo, editor of The Chronicle, talks to Kent Wada, director of IT policy at the University of California, about piracy on campuses.
Categories: Educause-2007
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