Independent Perspective News

By AMY HARMON

Us colleges across the country seek to stem the torrent of unauthorized digital media files flowing across their campus computer networks, students are devising increasingly sophisticated countermeasures to protect their free supply of copyrighted entertainment.

Most colleges have no plans to emulate the Naval Academy, which last week confiscated computers from about 100 students who are suspected of having downloaded unauthorized copies of music and movie files. But many are imposing a combination of new technologies and new policies in an effort to rein in the rampant copying.

"For our institutions this is a teachable moment," said Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel of the American Council on Education. "This is the time for them to step forward and demonstrate the value of intellectual property."

Some students may well emerge from educational sessions on copyright laws and electronic etiquette with a higher regard for intellectual property rights. But many of them are honing other skills as well, like how to burrow through network firewalls and spread their downloading activities across multiple computers to avoid detection.

"If you don't know how to do it, other people will just tell you," said Lelahni Potgieter, 23, who learned her file-trading techniques from an art student at her community college in Des Moines. "There's not much they can do to stop you."

Nevertheless, university administrators are trying, spurred on in part by a barrage of letters from entertainment companies notifying them of student abuses. Many entertainment concerns have hired companies to search popular file-trading networks for unauthorized files and track them to their source.

More pragmatic motivations, like the expense of large amounts of university's network bandwidth being absorbed by students' proclivity for online entertainment, are also driving the renewed university efforts.

Schools have closed off the portals used by file-trading services, installed software to limit how much bandwidth each student can use, and disciplined students who share media files. But nothing, so far, has proved entirely effective. "It's an ongoing battle," said Ron Robinson, a network architect at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill. "It's an administrative nightmare trying to keep up."

In a typical game of digital cat-and-mouse, Mr. Robinson said one of his first moves was to block the points of entry, or ports, into the network used by popular file-trading software like KaZaA.

But the newest version of the KaZaA software automatically searches for open ports and even insinuates itself through the port most commonly used for normal Web traffic, which must be kept open to allow some e-mail reading and other widely used applications to take place uninterrupted.

Even without KaZaA's help, students say they can easily use so-called port-hopping software to find a way past the university's blockades. So Mr. Robinson has rationed the amount of bandwidth that each student can use for file-trading activities.

Software with names like PacketHound, from Palisade Systems, or Packet Shaper, from Packeteer, enable network administrators to distinguish data that comes from the file-trading services and sequester it from the rest of the Internet traffic.

But there are ways around that, too. To limit the amount of data each student can download, administrators typically link a student ID to the computer in a dormitory room. To exceed those limits, some students find computers registered to others and use them to conduct their activities.

That practice has surfaced recently at Cornell University, where the number of complaints from copyright holders about unauthorized downloading in recent months has stayed at the same level as last year, but the number of students who were found to have been unwittingly downloading for others has risen, according to university officials.

About 50 students at Cornell were disciplined last year for unauthorized downloading, said Mary Beth Grant, the university's judicial administrator. All of those cases resulted from letters from copyright holders, because the university does not monitor what students do with their Internet access.

Nor does Cornell consider the trading of copyrighted music files to be among the more serious infractions. Students are typically required to perform a few hours of community service.

"It's theft and you're not supposed to steal, but this is different from someone engaging in credit card scams or breaking into a building to steal a computer," Ms. Grant said. "We're not in the business of trying to punish a student; we want them to learn from their mistake."

Indeed, the push from copyright holders for universities to police their networks has raised questions in the academic world about how to instill students with a sense of morality — and a knowledge of the law — about copyrights without intruding on their privacy and free speech rights.

"The biggest problem that universities are having is they have not openly decided whether their primary responsibility in this regard is law enforcement or education," said Virginia Rezmierski, who teaches in the University of Michigan's School of Information and recently surveyed universities on their monitoring practices. "Right now they're doing more monitoring than education."