Music Plunderers

By Andrew Eder, The Knoxville News-Sentinel, Tenn.

Feb. 21–University of Tennessee students have earned a high ranking on a list of dubious distinction.

They have prompted the fourth-most complaints nationally from the recording industry about online music piracy.

This school year, the Recording Industry Association of America, a music industry trade group, has sent 959 notices to UT informing the university that a user on its network is offering music for download illegally. That’s up from 153 notices in the 2005-06 school year.

In all, the RIAA has sent out 14,646 notices to universities this year compared to 4,916 notices last year, according to data provided by the association.

“If there’s one state in the nation that has a music identity, it’s Tennessee,” RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol said. “Many kids that graduate from these campuses want to go into the music business. The state universities in Tennessee ought to meet a higher standard.”

Bainwol was in Nashville on Wednesday along with officials from UT and the Tennessee Board of Regents to discuss the campus downloading issue in front of the Senate Education Committee.

The hearing was a follow-up to a resolution introduced last year by state Sen. Tim Burchett, R-Knoxville, requesting that state-owned networks examine their policies on peer-to-peer file-sharing services, which are often used to illegally share music, movies and other copyrighted materials.

At the hearing, Tim Rogers, UT’s vice chancellor for student affairs, told the committee about the university’s efforts to control illegal file sharing.

In an interview, Rogers said UT has a strict policy that has helped keep the number of repeat offenders low.

For a first offense, UT students receive a warning. For a second offense, students must bring their computers into the Office of Information Technology to have music-sharing programs deleted from their hard drives.

For a third offense, the student’s Internet service is suspended until the case is adjudicated through the Office of Student Judicial Affairs. Rogers said punishments range from a reprimand to dismissal from the university.

According to information provided by UT, the university received 985 copyright infringement notices last calendar year, of which 700 were music-related.

Only 57 of the 985, or 5.8 percent, were second offenses. In the last three years, there have been only three third-offenders.

“We have a relatively rigid protocol, and I think our stats bear out that beyond the first offense, there’s very little recidivism,” Rogers said.

Rogers said UT has offered a legal outlet since 2005 for students to download music. Its most recent vendor has cancelled its service, and Rogers said the university is preparing a request for proposals to replace the service.

In the meantime, Rogers said the university is encouraging students to download music from Ruckus, a legal download service free to students.

Although the RIAA has targeted nearly 1,000 UT students this school year, that number represents only students who were offering music for others to download on peer-to-peer services, which allow individual users to access content on other users’ personal computers.

In reality, the number of students downloading music or other materials illegally is far higher.

“Everybody downloads illegally. Everybody,” said Kristi Bogle, president of UT’s Student Government Association. “I’m not really sure what else UT could do about it.”

The RIAA trolls peer-to-peer services like BitTorrent and eDonkey to find users who are offering music for download. If it can trace the user’s Internet Protocol (IP) address to a university, the RIAA will send the school a copyright infringement notice.

When it receives a complaint, UT will use the IP address to identify the offending user and notify him or her with an e-mail message.

Bogle said she knows several students who have received warnings from the university, which are generally met with puzzlement.

“I think they were confused,” Bogle said. “Everyone does it, so they were confused as to why they were singled out.”

The RIAA’s Bainwol said online music piracy has hurt the industry, with music sales down 20 percent from 1999, when the program Napster first made online music sharing widespread.

Bainwol said UT administrators have been accessible and open about the need to address the issue of illegal downloading on campus.

“At the same time, we recognize that more needs to be done to deal with the problem,” Bainwol said. “The numbers are pretty striking.”

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Knoxville News-Sentinel, Tenn.

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