Monday, November 8, 1999

Carnegie Mellon Accuses 71 Students of Music Piracy, Unplugs Their Intranet Links By PETER SCHMIDT Carnegie Mellon University has disciplined 71 students for allegedly posting copyright-protected music on their sites within the university's computer network. The university said it discovered the copyright violations last month, when it conducted Seventy-one students had posted MP3's with copyright-protected songs on Web sites accessible to about 11,000 users of the university's computer network. surprise inspections of student computer files at the behest of the Recording Industry Association of America. "It is not our practice to actively police our own intranet," Paul G. Fowler, the university's associate dean of student affairs, said in an interview Sunday. "But," he added, "when somebody says to us, 'We have a problem with members of your community violating copyright laws,' we have to do something." Carnegie Mellon is one of about 300 colleges that have received letters from the association warning that they could be sued if their students use campus computer networks to violate copyright laws. The association is concerned mainly about lost sales as a result of students' copying compact disks onto MP3's -- a form of high-quality digital audio file -- and then posting them onto World-Wide Web sites where others can download them. On October 18, Carnegie Mellon randomly checked the public portions of 250 students' computer accounts, mainly "to find out whether we had a problem on our campus," Mr. Fowler said. It determined that 71 students had posted MP3's with copyright-protected songs on Web sites accessible to about 11,000 users of the university's computer network. The university accused the students of violating its policies requiring computer users to respect copyright laws. It punished them by suspending their home-computer access to the university network, thereby forcing the students to go to one of the campus's computer labs whenever they needed network access. "We had to hold the students accountable for violating university policy and copyright law, and the source of that violation was their computer," Mr. Fowler said. Several students criticized the university's inspections as an invasion of privacy. "There was a good bit of uproar," Mr. Fowler acknowledged. "The fact that the university had not actively enforced these policies up to this point caught a lot of students off guard." The students' home computers were to remain cut off from the university's network for the rest of the semester -- unless the students agreed to attend a 90-minute class on copyright rules, in which case their home-computer access to the network would be restored in four weeks. Background stories from The Chronicle: U. of Oregon Student Is Convicted of Serving Up Pirated Software and Music (8/26/99) Four Bates College Students Are Arrested on Software-Piracy Charges (4/14/99) Opinion: Colleges Need to Get Serious About Stopping Illegal Copying of Computer Software (10/9/98) Easy-to-print version E-mail this article