Hundreds of Washington University students will receive letters next week asking them to delete files illegally obtained from the recently terminated Direct Connect file-sharing program.
University officials first said they would send warning letters to the suspected students last month. Matt Arthur, director of Residential Technology Services (ResTech) at the University, said that they waited to send the letters because they want to make sure students understand the implications of the warnings.
“There was an evolution of how to draft [the letters]…to make sure the message is clear. We don’t want to make things murkier than they already are,” said Arthur.
According to Arthur, the letters will be sent to those students who used Direct Connect during the last weekend before its shutdown. Though the University administration originally suggested that the letters would refer some students to Judicial Administrator Tamara King, Arthur said that the letters being sent next week will not.
“The DC hub itself is not illegal, [therefore] using it is not illegal. We don’t exactly have any evidence [that students were illegally file sharing],” said Arthur. “This is a warning shot as much as an information letter. We want to remove the connection and follow the law. At this point we are not going to be referring anyone to the Judicial Administrator based on whether they get one of these letters or not.”
Officials from the University’s Office of Public Affairs played a role in shutting down the on-campus Direct Connect hub in late February. Many students believe an article in the Riverfront Times (RFT) alerted the administration to the presence of Direct Connect. The article, written by RFT staff writer Ben Westhoff, talked about file sharing by University students. Westhoff’s article quoted two University students and an employee.
The shutdown set off a flurry of activity on the part of both students and the university administration. Throughout the early morning hours before and after Direct Connect’s shutdown, students held a series of small rallies, including one at 4:30 a.m during which University band The Hatch attempted to play in support of Direct Connect. Campus police forced the members of the band to stop playing.
At the time of the shutdown, the University sought to punish several students directly involved with the Direct Connect hub and cautioned that while first-time offenders would be warned, second-time offenders would be subject to judicial action.
Matt Arthur suggested that in the future, ResTech will probably be more aware of the on-campus presence of file-sharing systems like Direct Connect.
“It all comes back to the two-headed monster: there’s bandwidth management and copyright violations. We are setting up tools so that we can see what the bandwidth problems are,” he said. “We are getting better tools to try to be aware of it next time.”
File sharing may come back to campus in other ways, however. At a Student Union discussion forum entitled “Connection Interrupted” that took place last month, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Technology Jan Weller suggested that the University is looking into the possibility of a University-sponsored file sharing program like those recently adopted on other campuses.
“When we have enough information, we’ll take it to the University council, and the University will make the decision as to whether that kind of service will be available here,” she said.