Students need an alternative to peer-to-peer networks

[janett999]

Eight-hundred-pound gorillas are running wild on every college campus in America. There is one in nearly every dorm room, pouting for attention. In fact, you could have your very own furry ape hunched upon your desk as you read this op-ed. But we students have chosen to ignore the growing epidemic of peer-to-peer file sharing.

In late March, the Recording Industry Association of America filed its latest round of lawsuits, for the first time specifically targeting college students and their families. Because the accused remain anonymous, they appear no more human than a descending green pixel in the matrix. Nevertheless, these college students are real and are about to receive subpoenas from Stanford University and more than 20 other universities across the country.

At present, the RIAA’s solution to the entertainment industry’s inability to keep up with digital technology over the past decade is a terror campaign designed to frighten students away from P2P, or peer-to-peer networks. If the entertainment industry had encouraged technological advances in the past, the unsuccessful and costly effort to pervert copyright laws in favor of the RIAA’s goals would be obsolete, and consumers’ downloading needs would be met.

Despite the number of legal ways to license digital media, the RIAA focused its efforts elsewhere, and throughout the history of file sharing inadvertently encouraged its evolution from the “central hub” of the good old Napster to the more pervasive “P2P” of Kazaa and others. This phenomenon has not changed, and the current RIAA efforts are driving students underground to become more skilled and evasive file sharers, as evidenced by the newly created sharing software entitled “Waste.”

Regardless of the current debate over copyright laws or the effect of downloads on record sales, it must be recognized that digital entertainment has become tethered to the college experience. Until a realistic alternative to P2P has been created and implemented on college campuses, it is unrealistic to expect students to meet their entertainment needs in any other way.

Student use of illegal P2P file-sharing software is a serious issue affecting our generation, and it deserves our attention. Efforts like those of Penn State and the University of North Carolina are a growing phenomenon and display the forward thinking of some universities. Clearly, students are beginning to see the need to curb illegal media piracy by supporting a realistic alternative to P2P; a solution that does not involve the RIAA’s multi-million-dollar lawsuits.

Stanford University, like all universities, is legally bound to comply with subpoenas because it fears prosecution from associations of lawyers who represent the five major record labels and the motion picture companies.

Nevertheless, our universities have been forced to foot the bill of increased Internet bandwidth requirements to support file-sharing and the costs of new administrators acting as liaisons between the RIAA and subpoenaed students. In addition to the risk of being handed a $98 billion ticket for downloading, as happened at Michigan Tech, students already face viruses, adware, spyware, and spoofed and mislabeled files.

Clearly, the dream of file sharing has been visited by the boogieman as the user experience of P2P networks has bottomed out and the subpoenas continue. It is time we advocate for a realistic alternative to illegal P2P to be placed on our college campuses to answer the concerns of all three concerned parties and finally end the ongoing legal battle that places students and universities in the crossfire. Now, before the next round of subpoenas reaches our campuses, we at the Get Real Campaign ask for your support in a growing student movement to find and support a realistic solution.

Until a viable alternative exists, it is unrealistic to expect that students will meet their needs in any other way. The RIAA should support realistic ways of licensing media, incorporate students into the process of finding a solution and end its current round of lawsuits.

Ethan K. Clay is a senior at Boston University and founder of the Get Real Campaign, a non-profit dedicated to finding a solution to the cycle of RIAA lawsuits and antiquated MPAA regulations. Contact him at ekc@bu.edu or visit http://www.getrealcampagin.org.



http://daily.stanford.edu/tempo?page...y=0001_article