The sound and the legal fury part II:
Illegal music file sharing and the UNCP honor code

By Lawren Shepard
Campus Life Editor

According to Dr. Maurice Mitchell, associate vice chancellor for information resources at UNCP, file sharing has been going on since 1969.

It began to cause major problems for many universities five or six years ago when illegal file sharing began to be popular among students.

(As many people may be wondering- have any UNCP students been targeted for legal action by the RIAA? “If any of them have been, we have not been notified,” Mitchell said.)

However, that’s not to say that illegal file sharing is not a problematic issue at UNCP.

In fact, according to Mitchell, an estimated 80 percent of all Universities’ bandwidth, or the amount of data that can be transferred through the Universities’ networks, is eaten up by students participating in P2P file sharing.

Although UNCP does not have the technological capabilities to accurately measure this, other schools in the UNC system have done so, and it is generally believed that the same statistics hold true here.
Furthermore, according to Mitchell, the University Computing and Information Services office “fairly regularly” receives calls from agents of copyright holders, notifying them of illegal activity taking place via the University network and asking the UCIS to remove the files from students’ machines.
“I just got another call about ten minutes ago, actually,” said Mitchell. “We get calls five or six times a week.”

The action taken by the UCIS is to disconnect the accused party’s access to the network, thus dealing with the immediate problem, then turn the issue (and the accused) over to Student Affairs for further action.

“This is an Honor Code issue,” said Mitchell. He emphasized that the Office of Student Affairs, not the UCIS, is responsible for whatever further restrictions or punishment may be deemed applicable.

Furthermore, the problem with illegal file sharing has become one of such importance that Mitchell recently met with the Dean of Students and the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs to decide how best to deal with it. “We do have plans for addressing this,” Mitchell said. “In the near future, students will be receiving a message informing them that this has become a problem, that it is a violation of the Honor Code.”

Meanwhile, in the world beyond the UNCP campus, events continue to unfold.

According to The Register, an online technology publication, the RIAA has been sued by both Sharman Networks, the owner of the Kazaa software, as well as the Webcaster Alliance.
The Webcaster Alliance, according to their website, is a trade organization of around 400 members, more than half of which are small businesses.

In a letter (available on the Alliance website) to Senator Norm Coleman, Chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and Committee on Governmental Affairs, Ann Gabriel, President of the Webcaster Alliance, wrote:

“Recently we filed a lawsuit against the RIAA alleging anticompetitive behavior. Our legal action against the RIAA comes more than a year after the Librarian of Congress set rates for our industry; rates that were based on an agreement deliberately crafted by the RIAA and Yahoo! and designed to shut out small webcasters and stifle competition. This ruling by the Librarian of Congress is the subject of an action currently pending in the DC Court of Appeals.

The horrors inflicted on the streaming media industry by the RIAA since the decision was handed down by the Librarian of Congress on July 8, 2002 have severely impacted the rights of millions of Americans. When I met personally with representatives from Sound Exchange and the RIAA in January of 2003, I was told, ‘We don’t care if 25,000 small webcasters go out of business, because then people will just have to get their music from AOL.’

‘AOL’ is ‘AOL Time-Warner,’ and Warner Records is one of the Big 5 members of the RIAA.”

Other organizations have also begun to get into the fight. According to the Webcaster Alliance’s website, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a motion to stop attempts by the music industry to get the name of a Boston College student accused of being a large-scale file trader.

Here at UNCP, students may be feeling the results of these ever-growing national and international events pressing in on their daily lives sooner than they expect.

“It’s about good citizenship,” said Mitchell. “We expect students to be good citizens and abide the laws of the people.”