[IP] Students Learning to Evade Moves to Protect Media Files

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Students Learning to Evade Moves to Protect Media Files

November 27, 2002
By AMY HARMON 




 

As 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."


http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/27/technology/27SWAP.html?ex=1039386927&ei=1&;
en=7dfab9a9c9814401



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