Now that the Recording Industry Association of America’s list of colleges with file-sharing problems has received plenty of press coverage, it’s worth taking another look at one program the trade group has touted as an antipiracy tool.
It’s likely that institutions like Ohio and Purdue Universities, and the University of Nebraska at Lincoln will hear plenty in the coming days about cGrid — a program developed at the University of Florida that automatically kicks students off the Internet if they are caught connecting to peer-to-peer networks. The software, originally known as Icarus, has been developed for commercial release by a company called RedLambda.
According to The Independent Florida Alligator, cGrid has done a bang-up job of keeping Florida free from the pesky copyright-infringement notices that many institutions receive regularly. But as the newspaper notes, the software hasn’t eliminated piracy altogether: Students still set up local networks to swap music. Some critics have argued that cGrid is a threat to academic freedom, so it will be interesting to see whether colleges flooded with copyright-infringement notices will consider the tool a worthwhile investment.
For more on cGrid, see an April 2004 article from The Chronicle. —Brock Read
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