Shiver me DVDs
During his first year at Anglia Polytechnics IT in England, Simon Batih started a home business.
With low overhead and a mind for the industry, Batih was netting thousands of pounds each month and dropped out of school to focus on his business.
Within six months of the venture, however, Batih sat in Ipswich Crown Court and pled guilty to seven charges of copyright infringement.
According to a Feb. 15, 2006, article in the Suffolk Free Press, Batih netted £28,000 during his six-month operation. Batih pirated video games for X Box, Playstation and other gaming systems and sold copies for £4- £6. The games typically sell for around £40.
“This is not a victimless crime,” Judge John Devaux said while sentencing Batih. “Trademark holders and legitimate traders lost out.”
While selling pirated CDs, DVDs and video games on street corners may not be a massive problem in Logan, the advent of peer-to-peer networks has caused copyright infringement to steadily increase from year to year.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, from 1994 to 2002, the number of cases in which plaintiffs sought civil remedies related to patent, trademark and copyright infringement increased 20 percent to 8,254. Of the defendants accused of intellectual property theft, 88 percent were convicted.
“Any intellectual or artistic work is protected by copyright and [the creator] or their agents are free to distribute it on whatever terms they decide to. Anyone else who takes part in that distribution is infringing copyright,” said Bob Bayn, associate director of network and computing services at USU.
Though universities around the country can receive up to several dozen complaints from copyright watchdogs each week, Utah State University receives only half a dozen or so complaints in a given semester, Bayn said.
The complaints are sent by companies that monitor file sharing using automated processes to check for the availability of files they are interested in protecting, he said. If one of these copyright watchdogs discovers that a student is allowing free distribution of copyrighted material through a file-sharing utility (like Gnutella, Morpheus, KaZaA or BitTorrent), Bayn said they then send a complaint to that student’s Internet service provider.
“The question is, do we get many copyright infringement complaints and the answer is no. I suspect [it’s due to] some combination of the fact that students here understand and respect the issue better and the resources available to them are fewer,” Bayn said.
While using peer-to-peer networks is not illegal, if a student downloads or allows others to upload copyrighted material, they are infringing on the copyright.
“There’s a lot of the open-source material and public domain stuff that is free-released by its author that is out there that is legally shared by peer-to-peer software,” Bayn said. “The peer-to-peer technology is legal. It’s like the gas pedal in your car – you can use it legally or you can use it illegally, but the gas pedal itself is legal.”
One way to safely use peer-to-peer networks is to disable the ability of other users to upload files from your computer. Instructions on how to disable peer-to-peer file sharing can be found through the University of Chicago at http://security.uchicago.edu.
Any student with a USU e-mail account or a dorm IP address made an appropriate use agreement which included the provision that students would not acquire or distribute copyrighted material without complying with the owner’s licensing terms (which usually means paying for the files).
USU network and computing services monitor bandwidth use by students with a dorm IP address, he said. When they notice unusually high bandwidth use (which can be caused by a number of different things in addition to file sharing), he said Network and Computing Services will send the student a message alerting them of the problems associated with illegal file sharing.
“We explicitly do not investigate the nature of the bandwidth use unless the student says he has no idea why the bandwidth is high and then we’ll work with them to figure out why,” Bayn said.
If the university does receive a complaint, the student’s access could be terminated and the student could be referred for university disciplinary action. Even if a student is not caught, however, Bayn said there is a moral obligation to comply with copyright laws.
“The university has always supported copyright laws. The moral issue, and there are people who will take a different stand, is that protecting the rights of the people who create intellectual property ensures their payment for that effort. In an academic environment where a lot of intellectual property is created, that seems especially valuable,” Bayn said.
For more information on what constitutes copyright infringement, read the Digital Millennium Copyright Act available at http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf.
-mattgo@cc.usu.edu