By Ryan Singel

Source Link

In the last 10 days, universities around the country have seen more than a 20-fold increase in the number of filesharing takedown notices from the recording industry, in an unexplained spike that seems focused on colleges in the Midwest.

The spike is not matched by an increase in actual file sharing.

"Universities are getting as many notices from the RIAA in one day as what they would typically get from all content owners in a month," says Mark Luker, a vice president of higher education technology advocate Educause.

Indiana University says that starting on April 21, the Recording Industry Association of America began sending 80 legal notices a day to the university, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Typically, the university handles less than 100 such notices a month from the RIAA, the Motion Picture Association of America and HBO combined.

The DMCA notices include information about a specific IP address, file sharing protocol and named infringing file.

Indiana University's tech staff routinely compare those details against the university's logs to make sure that the allegations are accurate, according to Mark Bruhn, an associate vice president of IU's information technology department.

But many of the recent notices don't correspond to entries in traffic logs, which also don't show any overall increase in file sharing, Bruhn said.

"We are not sure now what we have is an allegation of copyright infringement or an allegation of possible future illegal behavior," Bruhn said."The whole thing is very concerning, to be frank. We don't know why they are doing this and I'm not sure they know what they are doing."

"They in fact can't know if the files being offered are actually the protected works of their clients -- how would they know if they didn't download and open them?" Bruhn said.

University of Chicago has also seen a recent surge, its CIO confirmed to THREAT LEVEL.

Meanwhile, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported Wednesday that George Washington University and University of Cincinnati are also reporting spikes beginning two weeks ago.

For its part, the RIAA denies there's anything new to the letters, sending along a stock statement to THREAT LEVEL.

"We are always making an effort to more effectively and efficiently detect infringing activity on the Internet, as we are continuously looking for ways to improve our ability to find and act on incidences of theft online. Having said that, there's been no change in our procedures."

RIAA spokeswoman Liz Kennedy did not respond to a follow-up request to explain the surge , and IU's analysis that notices were being sent without proof of infringement.

Luker finds the RIAA's position difficult to believe.

"It is for us hard to accept that students are multiplying their infringements by 30," Luker said.

Bruhn concurs.

"The RIAA says it is not new, but clearly it is," Bruhn said.

University of California at Berkeley's chief information officer Shel Waggener confirmed he'd heard of the spikes and suggested there was a political purpose driving them.

"Public universities are in a unique position since the industry puts pressure on us through state legislatures to try to impose what are widely considered to be draconian content monitoring measures and turn us into tech police forces in support of a specific industry," Waggener said.

The RIAA is also backing legislation in states such as Illinois and Tennessee that would require schools that get a certain number of notices to begin installing deep packet monitoring equipment on their internet and intranets, according to Luker.

"The number of DMCA notices that are sent to a university vary wildly from one day to the next, and no one, including the federal government knows how they send them out or what criteria they use," Luker said. "It is not reasonable in any way to use those counts as a basis for government actions."

IU's Bruhn says the school has typically treated the notices seriously, requiring first time offenders to take an online tutorial about copyright, suspending second time offenders from the university's net for two weeks and indefinitely suspending anyone caught a third time.

Bruhn, Waggener and Luker all downplayed the amount of file sharing occurring on campus networks these days, saying that the MPAA, for instance, radically overestimated how much movie piracy was attributable to college students. For more than two years, the industry claimed that more than 40 percent of illegal movie downloads came from college students -- costing the industry billions of dollars. Then in January of this year, the estimate was reduced to 15% for college-aged students, and only 3% occurring on campus networks.

"The RIAA is also backing legislation in states such as Illinois and Tennessee that would require schools that get a certain number of notices to begin installing deep packet monitoring equipment on their internet and intranets, according to Luker."

Crystal clear.

so they want it based off the number of notices received, whats to stop them from sending even more frivalous notices just to force packet monitoring.

Why shouldn't the RIAA send out
more notices to colleges ?

Most, ( not all ) of these universities
have demonstrated that they will bend
over rather than fight .. just what the
RIAA wants. With the major problems
the RIAA is having with the ones that
DO fight back this seems like a pretty
natural developement.

Still nothing sent to Harvard.

Shocking.

They wrote a letter to 40,000 people telling them to send $4000 and 39,900 paid up, with only 100 even bothering to complain and exactly one stepping up to question the legitimacy of the demand and they'll make that case drag out for years.

One out of 40,000. Without clearing up a single basic issue.

That's easy money compared to selling records. In fact, over the five-year period, the lawsuits have brought in more money than what they claim is the retail value of the vinyl format and the CD single combined; lawsuits are outperforming the entire format life of DVD audio and SACD combined.

There are still tens of millions of p2p and bittorrent users out there.

They can run this game for decades.

Wow. It's like someone else wrote that last post. For some reason, I never made that comparison before. Now the people in my head are having a debate about this, so I'll let you know how that turns out.

It makes sense George.

I'm going to make some assumptions ..
( The RIAA does it and the media takes
it as truth .. why not ) ...

Let's assume that everyone of those
40,000 is an average college student.

How much does and average college
student spend per year on Music cd's ?

I am willing to bet, that even without
P2P ever existing, that dollar amount
would NOT equal 4,000 per year.

Money for nothing and your chicks for
free is fucking right.

Okay, my team voted and elected another chart because this eliminates the need for wordy explanations.

It's on my front page.

Check this...



May 6

Mysterious Multiplication of Copyright Complaints
It’d be hard to argue that Indiana University doesn’t take illegal downloading seriously. As noted on its “Are You Legal” Web site, the university imposes a $50 fine for the first notice university officials receive from entertainment companies about a student’s alleged improper sharing of copyrighted music or video, and cuts off the student’s access to the Indiana network if he or she fails a 10-question quiz within 24 hours. The penalties ramp up from there.

But Indiana officials are now discussing whether they should continue to respond to complaints from the recording industry with the same aggressiveness. It’s not that university leaders have suddenly decided that illegal behavior isn’t wrong; instead, they are beginning to question the legitimacy of the notices the Recording Industry Association of America sends accusing network users of illegally sharing music.

That’s because, like many colleges and universities, officials at Indiana have seen an eye-popping increase in the number of complaints they’ve received at a time when campus administrators say they have not seen any sort of rise in traffic that would suggest more piracy. Instead, college technology experts — lacking an explanation from industry officials for the upturn — suspect that the recording industry has altered the standards it uses to allege illegal behavior, targeting not only instances in which computer users have actively shared music illegally, but instances in which they have stored downloaded music in a folder visible to other users, opening the way to a potential violation.

That has officials at Indiana and elsewhere reconsidering how seriously they take the threats the recording industry aims at their students, which has been part of a continuing disagreement between the entertainment industries and higher education leaders over whether the recording and movie industries are disproportionately singling out college students (and their host institutions) for the broader Internet piracy problem.

“We’ve been handling the notices as allegations of actual infringement,” said Mark S. Bruhn, chief IT security and policy officer in Indiana’s Information Technology Policy Office. “But if they are not allegations of illegal behavior, but of possible future infringement, we may wind up discarding them.”

As Indiana and other institutions reported significant upturns in the number of complaints they were fielding, officials of the RIAA have been relatively silent on the matter, letting prepared statements that say little speak for them, thereby encouraging speculation like Bruhn’s.

In an interview late Monday, Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, specifically rebutted the idea that the industry had altered its criteria for going after illegal downloaders. Sherman attributed the “phenomenal jump” in the number of complaints to a “major change in the software and hardware” its major vendor uses to detect online infringement. Nothing about the industry’s approach changed, Sherman said: “It’s the same procedures, the same standards, the same list of copyrighted works that we’re using.” The only changes, he said, were a more efficient software and an increased number of servers powering the industry’s searching for possible shared material.

“The Internet is a huge place, and there are millions of people connected to it,” he said. “The amount of resources you put into sending out requests for specific files makes a difference; the more requests you make, the more you’re going to find.”

He added: “We don’t think there’s any more infringement going on. We just think there’s more detection of infringement.”

In the first 20 days of April, Indiana received a total of 70 complaints directing the institution to take down illegally downloaded content. It received 70 notices alone on April 21. April 22 brought 97. The next few weekdays delivered 44, 91, 83, 72 and 58. Other universities, from major ones like the University of Michigan to smaller institutions such as Whitworth University, are also reporting significant increases in notices from recording companies. Most institutions in the Council on Institutional Cooperation, which includes the Big Ten universities and the University of Chicago, reported big rises in a recent survey, according to Bruhn.

He said he and other officials at Indiana have not seen a concomitant increase in actual network traffic, and that the campus is actually emptying out as students finish their final exams and head home. That led Indiana IT administrators to seek an explanation for the dramatic upturn from contractors that the recording companies use to monitor possible illegal file sharing, and Bruhn said that one of the contractors had said that because one student had one of a record company’s songs available to other users in his or her public index of songs, the university would be receiving a DMCA notice.

Entertainment industry lawyers have long maintained — and argued in court — that it is a copyright infringement to “make available” illegally downloaded music or movies, even if the material is not actually shared. That has been among the battleground issues in court cases over peer to peer file sharing, and the terrain remains disputed, even though two of three relatively recent court rulings (including last month’s denial of a summary judgment in the closely watched Atlantic v. Howell case) have rejected the recording industry’s argument that making content available for possible download is just as much copyright infringement as actual dissemination of the material.

That legal fight is among the factors that has Bruhn and other college officials wondering if the recording industry is altering its approach to try to buttress its political and legal standing, especially given the fact that the statistics entertainment officials have leaned on to persuade Congress to target higher education for a crackdown on downloading were acknowledged early this year to be flawed.

Could the industry, they wonder, be ramping up its allegations against college students now to try to reinforce its case to the courts and to Congress that colleges are, in fact, a hotbed of illegal file sharing activity?

Sherman scoffed at that notion. “We have been asking the contractor for years to increase the computing power of its effort, and to search more to detect infringement,” he said Monday. “We’ve had a standing request to maximize efficiency for what they do for us.... We didn’t even know they were putting a new system online.”

Despite the timing, there is “no connection whatsoever” between the upturn and either the court cases suggesting that actual infringement needs to occur for a finding of copyright violation or the perceived need for new data to show Congress that illegal file sharing is rampant on campuses, Sherman said.

“We would have preferred this uptick five years ago,” he said.

— Doug Lederman

The original story and user comments can be viewed online at http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/05/06/riaa.

© Copyright 2008 Inside Higher Ed

"Could the industry, they wonder, be ramping up its allegations against college students now to try to reinforce its case to the courts and to Congress that colleges are, in fact, a hotbed of illegal file sharing activity?"

Oh, never; perish the thought. The industry wouldn't even think about doing anything unethical, would they?


“We would have preferred this uptick five years ago,” Sherman said.

I would have preferred that you and your dinosaur corporations had DIED five years ago.

Nothing about the industry’s approach changed, Sherman said: “It’s the same procedures, the same standards, the same list of copyrighted works that we’re using.”

The same standards? Didn't they use to just go after "aggregious" sharers who were offering 1,000 songs or more?

The same list of copyrighted works? New releases haven't been added to the list?

one student had one of a record company’s songs available to other users in his or her public index of songs

one song = aggregious file sharing?

If not, Cary Sherman is lying. Again. That's the one thing that hasn't changed.

Currently at the front page of AzOz: Music's Hottest Market -- Lawsuits

------------------------

Wow. I'm like you George, I used to not believe the canard that the RIAA was using the p2p lawsuits as a direct revenue generation machine.

But now, I'm not so sure anymore.

Here's one that'll make your head explode.

Ray Beckerman reports: "We have just learned that Richard L. Gabriel, the lawyer heading up the RIAA's litigation campaign, has been appointed as a state court, Court of Appeals, judge, in Colorado, effective July 1st."

And this is not in any way conflict of interest? I'm glad I don't live in Colorado, but sad that I do live in Tennessee; I had no idea of the moronic law they are trying to pass here.

And this is not in any way conflict of interest?

Only if he hears cases involving the RIAA.

Now that I've had a while to think about it, this actually sounds like a good thing to me, especially since I don't live in Colorado. Gabriel was their lead counsel, their big dog in the courtroom. After July 1, he will never be able to argue their side again and won't be allowed to preside over their cases.

It's all good.

Judge Richard Owen got to hear an
RIAA case, and he has a contract
with a label, ( an ofshoot of sony I
would guess by the guest musicians
on his CD ).