The Costs of Policing Campus Networks
October 20th, 2008 | Published in All Articles, Copyright Infringement, Cost of P2P, Educational, Legal Risks, News Articles
Inside Higher Education News – October 20, 2008
Colleges have been asserting for months — in an effort to persuade Congress not to impose new requirements on them to fight illegal file sharing — that they‟re spending big bucks to monitor, prevent and discipline online behavior that could run afoul of copyright law. But lawmakers ignored their pleas and added several new mandates to the Higher Education Act in August.
Now that it‟s been a few months, and the dust has settled, it seems fair to ask: What does it cost to comply with the provisions of the law that require colleges to police their students‟ peer-to-peer activity? With budgets responding to the economic slowdown — not to mention the uniquely open nature of campus networks — the question is hardly academic.
Beginning in July, the Campus Computing Project, the largest ongoing study of colleges‟ use of information technology, conducted a special survey focusing on peer-to-peer issues. The results, developed from the responses of senior IT officials at 321 two- and four-year private and public institutions, provide a snapshot of the costs, both in terms of dollars and manpower, of the P2P-related mandates that by that time were evidently going to be included in the final bill.
“We‟re talking lots of money here when you aggregate it out,” said Kenneth C. Green, founding director of the survey and a longtime critic of the entertainment industry‟s tactics against campus Internet providers. The resources that large research universities may now be required to expend for P2P-related mandates, he added, could amount to an “enforcement subsidy” of $350,000 to $500,000 a year. As a result of heavy lobbying by the recording and film industries, the Higher Education Act now contains specific provisions aimed at curbing illegal file sharing at colleges.
For example, colleges are “required to consider the use of technology-based deterrents” in developing plans to counter illegal peer-to-peer activity, such as traffic monitoring and bandwidth shaping — technologies that even some proponents have described as limited in their scope and susceptible to an ongoing “arms race” of tactics by downloaders. Colleges are also required to disclose to their students the legal implications of sharing copyrighted works and to provide legal alternatives to illegal file sharing networks.
But in the report, released today, Green notes that even that requirement is not an absolute mandate. In a separate interview, he also said that campuses could sign up for free, ad-supported music services such as Ruckus to stay within the bounds of the law without expending any resources. (Three out of the 59 responding institutions who use such services said they pay fees, and all three signed up with Napster.)
“The good news out of this is to say that there‟s a way to be compliant with the mandate for an alternative music service,” he said. “Campuses have found a way to do that … and it seems to work.”