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CMU cracks down on 71 students for Internet music 'piracy'
Saturday, November 06, 1999 By Bill Schackner, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
The Internet may be a superhighway of freebies, but don't tell that to dozens of Carnegie Mellon University students who are paying a stiff toll for taking copyrighted music and sharing it with others on the Web.
Seventy-one students lost their in-room link to the campus network for the rest of the semester after the school conducted a surprise inspection of computer files and found they had publicly posted audio files containing copyrighted music.
The school said it had acted to guard against claims from the recording industry, which a couple of years ago launched a campaign to discourage music piracy among students on technology-oriented campuses including Carnegie Mellon.
But students said the inspections were an invasion of privacy.
At many schools, high-quality digital audio files -- commonly known as MP3s -- have become as popular a possession as compact discs.
Students with the right software and a little savvy can copy all or part of a CD onto MP3s, then leave them on a Web site for others, much as students a generation ago shared copies of albums.
The posting of those files to some represents the Internet at its best, a free-wheeling place where information and goods can be quickly obtained at no charge. But to record producers and performers, it is a question of artistic control and lost sales.
"There's millions of dollars being lost in the recording industry as a result of the increasingly easy access to MP3 files on all college campuses," said Paul Fowler, Carnegie Mellon associate dean of student affairs.
"I'm adamantly opposed to using any sort of control over people's personal computers, but when somebody says to me, 'We have a problem with members of your community violating copyright laws,' you have to do something," he said.
Many students since the inspection have placed their music files off limits to others by adding a password that must be used to access them. But before that, the computer system on Carnegie Mellon's campus -- as on other campuses nationwide -- offered a buffet of popular hits by artists from the Stone Temple Pilots to Limp Bizkit to Madonna.
"I would say that in the course of a couple of hours I could probably get access to every CD that I would ever want to buy for the next six months," Fowler said.
The Recording Industry Association of America launched a campaign to discourage misuse of MP3 files by college students a couple of years ago. Frank Creighton, an executive who oversees its anti-piracy efforts, said there has been a noticeable increase in efforts by schools to enforce copyright rules, but he had not heard of random computer searches like the one conducted by Carnegie Mellon. "I'm excited to hear about it," he said.
The association now works with 300 campuses but initially focused on science-heavy schools where Web sites containing large numbers of illegally posted MP3s were most likely to appear. Besides Carnegie Mellon, the schools initially approached by the association included the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, California Institute of Technology, Cornell University and the University of California at Berkeley.
"The first sites we saw just happened to be at these technology-oriented schools," said Creighton, senior vice president of the association. "They have students whose minds are geared toward being creative and showing ingenuity and solving problems."
Fowler said he got a pair of warning letters last month on the same day from the Recording Association about music posted by students on the campus computer network. He also heard from John Lerchey, a campus computing employee, who alerted him to reports that two students were maintaining sites with several hundred MP3s each.
"John called me and said it seemed to him that we were getting more and more reports. There seemed to be rampant sharing of the files," he said.
The school authorized Lerchey on Oct. 18 to randomly check the public portions of computer files belonging to 250 students. Seventy-one had MP3s with copyrighted songs.
"We had a problem," Fowler said.
Computers belonging to those 71 students were cut off from the campus computer network, meaning the students would have to go to a computer lab to send e-mail or to use the Internet or other campus computing services.
Fowler said students agreeing to take a class in copyright rules will regain access to the campus network in four weeks.
He said the school only viewed portions of student files that would have been easily accessible by others. But many students on campus questioned the way the investigation was conducted.
"I think the students who got disciplined realized they had done wrong and kind of had it coming. But I think the issue was the manner in which [the search] was conducted and the fact that it came from out of nowhere," said Kevin Babbitt, editor in chief of the student newspaper, The Tartan.
He said some students complained that Carnegie Mellon had ignored its own policy, which forbids students from entering files belonging to others unless they are specifically labeled as open to the public.
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