Pam Buzzetta/Student LifeWashington University students frequently kick back and enjoy movies or music downloaded from Kazaa. But for some, this fun ends in an unpleasant surprise.
Asha Haji, a sophomore in the School of Engineering, came back to her room one day to find that her computer was blocked from the Internet.
“I thought, oh man, I can’t believe it,” said Haji. “I was very shocked.”
Haji later found out that music giant Sony was behind the Internet stoppage.
“There was a letter sent to [ResTech] from Sony about a song download,” she said. “I had downloaded an Incubus CD. They were tapping into Kazaa, looking for people who shared it.”
Haji had a meeting with Matt Arthur, the director of ResTech. After Haji agreed to shut off Kazaa, ResTech restored her Internet access.
“They had to do something because Sony mailed them,” said Haji.
According to Arthur, Haji’s case is not an isolated incident.
“The university gets complaints from different organizations, per the DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act],” said Arthur.
Big entertainment industry organizations-including the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America-regularly enforce their copyrights whenever they can, said Arthur. File-sharers at college are particularly susceptible because their Internet Protocol (IP) addresses can be traced back to large college institutions, which are compelled to act in compliance with the DMCA.
An IP address uniquely identifies a user’s computer on the Internet, and nearly all Web sites and servers maintain logs of the IP addresses that connect to them. If a student leaves her computer on Kazaa, and a music industry snoop finds that student sharing one of the files his company owns the copyright to, he can easily determine the student’s IP address and trace it back to its origin.
Arthur said, however, that turning off Kazaa’s outgoing file stream, which lets outsiders download music, would not stop a student from being found out.
“If everybody wanted to take, but not give, there would be nothing to share,” he said. “It still shares your information, and you don’t even know it.”
While ResTech will act if the RIAA or MPAA requests an investigation into the file sharing, ResTech does not act on its own.
“We don’t go looking for people who share files,” said Arthur.
Students targeted by the record companies have their Internet access turned off until they come to ResTech and sign a paper saying they won’t steal music in the future.
Some students are not happy about repercussions for such a common crime.
“I think that any attempt to prosecute for file sharing is ridiculous, because it happens on such a wide scale,” said freshman Jonathan Thomas. “It’s such a petty crime. Everyone does it.”
Freshman Joshua Trein took a more moderate position.
“I understand the university’s legal position,” he said. “Is it crap? Yes. I would be mad if they only prosecuted me. But if they did everyone blanket-wise, it’d be okay.”
Unfortunately for students, cases similar to Haji’s are becoming more common.
“There’ve probably been eight to ten a month, and interestingly enough, the numbers have increased each year,” said Arthur.
Students do have an asylum of sorts. According to the hub operator of the popularly used Direct Connect, this program has a function that automatically boots off any person using a non-WU IP address. Thus, students are safe from prosecution when using this file sharer.