May 2, 2007
Lawmakers Request Information on Campus Peer-to-Peer Policies
Lawmakers are turning up the heat on 20 colleges that, according to entertainment-industry officials, have not been able to stop students from downloading music and movies illegally.
The colleges in question were culled from a pair of lists released by the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, each purporting to name the colleges that had received the most notices of copyright infringement over the past academic year. Now leaders of the U.S. House of Representatives Committees on the Judiciary and on Education and Labor have sent letters to the presidents of those institutions, urging them to take "reasonable steps" to curtail campus piracy.
The letters also ask recipients to answer a multipage survey detailing their colleges' policies on peer-to-peer networking, network filtering, and computing-ethics education. Responses are due at the end of May.
Campus officials are likely to find some of the survey questions a bit leading. At one point, for example, the lawmakers ask whether the colleges receiving the letter provide students with subsidized cable-TV access. That seems like a clear reference to an argument long made by recording-industry officials -- that students have come to view legal music-downloading services as important campus amenities, like cable. College administrators who have struggled to promote such services probably don't share that sentiment.
Nevertheless, lawmakers insist in the letters that the survey will be a valuable information-gathering tool: "It will ... help us to assess whether Congress needs to advance legislation to ensure the unacceptable use of educational facilities to obtain or traffic in copyrighted goods is no longer commonly associated with student life on some U.S. campuses."
Some of the campus presidents who get these letters may honestly wonder what they've done wrong. Several of the colleges named on the RIAA and MPAA lists seem to have made good-faith efforts to curtail piracy. And some institutions, like Ohio University, have argued that the lists rely on copyright-infringement statistics that are either misleading or erroneous. Now that the lists are being used by lawmakers, we'll see if more colleges step up to complain. --Brock Read
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