issues story

Alison Neubauer
Jrn 400
Issues Story
1975

The reason University of Illinois freshman Edgar Solomonik couldn’t get onto the Internet one day in early fall of 2009, was because Warner Brother’s had caught him illegally downloading the movie Watchmen on the campus network. Solomonik said he knew it wasn’t a big deal but he had to have a meeting with the Associate Dean of Students before CITES would reconnect him to the network. This is routine and Solomonik is one of hundreds that get caught each year.
The Associate Dean of Students, Brian Farber said that he gets one to two notices in his email every day about students who have been caught. Last year, at the University of Illinois about 1,200 students were caught downloading illegal files, according to Chief Privacy and Security Officer Mike Corn. Corn works for the Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services Security Office. CITES provides the campus with email, online course management systems, file storage, web publishing and telephone services. The security office handles all campus security dealing with computers. Corn’s problems range from viruses and hacked programs to insuring information privacy.
“We do not do any active monitoring,” said Corn, in regards to catching illegal downloaders.
Illegal downloading is an issue all over the world and the Motion Picture Association of America and The Recording Industry Association of America are organizations that work to protect the property rights and First Amendment rights of artists. They work to catch people who are downloading copyrighted material for free. These organizations, along with other copyright agencies, are the ones who catch students and then notify the school where the offense took place.
These notifications are first sent to the security office who forwards them to Farber at the Office of Student Conflict Resolution. Conflict Resolution responds to conflicts and crisis on campus dealing with student discipline, mediation and responding to acts of intolerance. Illegal downloading falls under student discipline.
“We talk with them about it and give them a formal sanction, usually a reprimand for the first offense. We ask them to remove all copyrighted material from their computer and have them sign off on it on an acceptance of case disposition form,” said Farber.
Once the University gets a notice about an illegal download, CITES checks network traffic logs to verify that the complaint is valid. If it is, like in the case of Solomonik, CITES removes that student from the network immediately until the student meets with the Associate Dean. Farber then contacts the copyright agency that sent the notice to tell them that they are disciplining the student and having them remove the material from their computer. According to Farber, this keeps good relations with the agencies and keeps students or the University from getting sued.
In 2007, 78 students at Northern Illinois University were caught illegally downloading copyrighted material. When NIU refused to give the names of the students to the RIAA, NIU was told that either they give them the names of the students or they would sue NIU. So NIU gave the names. All except 34 settled out of court and cost each about $3,000-$5,000, according to an article in the Northern Star, NIU’s newspaper.
“If you were caught, your Internet wouldn’t let you on and somehow they would have a message from the Information Technology Services saying that you needed to go in and see them,” said Victoria Stanton, sophomore majoring in Psychology and Education at NIU. “You had to bring in your computer and if they found you had been downloading illegally they would make you delete all your stuff and possibly pay fines.”
Stanton’s roommate was caught and she knows that she had to delete all of her illegal programs but she doesn’t know if she was fined. Now that Stanton lives in her sorority house and isn’t on the campus network she downloads illegally.
“I have Limewire. I’m pretty sure it’s illegal,” said Stanton.
“If we didn’t respond in the way that we did I could cost you $3,000 that I could take care of with a conversation,” said Farber. “The RIAA look kindly on us.”
According to Corn, the security office gets notifications of copyright infringement from copyright agencies and the University takes discipline action from there. According to Farber, the minimum disciplinary sanction for the first offense is a university reprimand which stays on the student’s university disciplinary file for one year. After one year it is wiped off the record. More serious consequences occur if a student commits more offenses.
“It doesn’t happen often that people get caught again,” said Farber. If a student is caught again, though, they could be put on censure or conduct probation. If a student receives censure the offense goes on their record until they graduate and only if the student signs a release can others view the record. If a student receives conduct probation, the offense goes on their transcript until they graduate and if the student makes one more mistake it could result in removal from the University. Solomonik got a reprimand.
Corn explained the bandwidth limitation for downloading in residence halls. It is also outlined on the University’s housing website.
Whether a student is downloading illegally or not, “In a 24 hour period, you’re only allowed to download a certain amount. When you reach that limit your internet speed slows greatly to the point where it isn’t even useful,” said Corn. The limit depends in the restricted class the download falls under. There are three classes. The unrestricted class has no limits, unrestricted class A has a limit or 2 GB and unrestricted class B has a limit of 5 GB.
Solomonik, a major in Computer Sciences, was caught downloading the movie Watchmen in the Siebel Center and was caught once in his dorm, Illinois Street Residence Halls, when he changed his MAC address. MAC stands for media access control and is used for identification.
“I reset my MAC address three times in one day and I guess they noticed,” said Solomonik, laughing.
Solomonik said that Warner Brother’s had emailed the school and CITES disabled his Internet for a couple days until he met with the Dean. He got an email notice for both offenses. Solomonik said that he thinks that the University’s policies are fair.
“They made me sign a thing that I would delete all my music and movies,” said Solomonik, laughing, “like I’d delete all my music and movies.”
Kara Kopija, a sophomore majoring in communications at the University of Illinois, has been illegally downloading music and movies for nine years. She has almost 8,000 songs and 100 movies but doesn’t see her actions as illegal or wrong.
“I really don’t see it as illegal, I see it as file sharing,” said Kopija. “File sharing is just the same as back before CDs and DVDs and digital copies. People used to make mixed tapes on cassette tapes and people would copy movies on VHS and record TV shows. It’s the same concept, copying movies then was a copyright law violation but nobody cared because it was on such a small level.”
Kopija said that she would never download a movie, copy it to a DVD and sell it because she sees that as wrong. To get around bandwidth limitations in the dorms she changed her IP address specifying that she wasn’t hiding but rather just getting around the limits. She also said that she doesn’t know anybody who has been caught for copyright violations and all of her close friends download illegally. She learned how to download illegally from Google.
“I’ve never hacked anything. I wouldn’t even know where to start. But learning how to use and find hacked programs, I Googled it,” said Kopija. “You just Google it and it explains how to do everything. That’s how I learned to use torrents,” said Kopija. Torrents are file sharing protocols that are used to distribute data between computers, according to Wikipedia.org.
Despite knowing that there are consequences if caught illegally downloading, students still do it.
The Copyright Law, as stated on the RIAA’s website says “the Federal law provides severe civil and criminal penalties for the unauthorized reproduction, distribution, rental or digital transmission of copyrighted sound recordings. (Title 17, United States Code, sections 501 and 506). The FBI investigates allegations of criminal copyright infringement and violators will be prosecuted.” This means that making unauthorized copies of copyrighted material is stealing and breaking the law and the person could be held legally liable for thousands of dollars. The RIAA states on its website that piracy is stealing from song writers, sound engineers and label employees. On a global scale piracy costs $12.5 billion dollars of economic losses each year and there have been 71,060 U.S. jobs lost.
An analysis for the MPAA said that major U.S. motion picture studios lost $6.1 billion to piracy. Piracy of hard copies such as DVD’s cost 62% of the $6.1 billion and 38% was from Internet piracy. Most of the pirating was done outside of the U.S. being highest in China, then Russia, and Thailand. The report also said that the typical pirate age is between 16 and 24, is male and lives in an urban area.
Pirate Bay is a Swedish based website that is one of the largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet. They were found guilty Friday April 17, 2009 of making copyrighted material available on their website and assisting in copyright infringement, according to the article on Digital Journal. They reported that the four members of the Pirate Bay team have been fined over $3.6 million, will spend one year in jail and it was ruled that it is illegal to use BitTorrent at the Pirate Bay site. People all over the world use this site and other similar sites such as Mininova and Isohunt to find torrents that allow them to download music and movies for free online. Downloading copyrighted material for free online is theft and therefore illegal.
Not only is this a federal law but it is also in the University’s Student Code so when a student is found guilty of illegally downloading content they have broken the Student Code.
The Student Code can be found on the University’s website. Section 1-302.n.6 states “abuse of computers where the university community’s interest is substantially affected, including but not limited to: the use of computing facilities and resources in violation of copyright laws.”
Student Legal Services said students can protect themselves by checking to see if the site has a restriction on use or an explicit notice of copyright before downloading. SLS also said that the RIAA and MPAA specifically target college students.
CITES’ website explains the three basic models for file sharing that students can get caught using. One model is called the system-native which is built into a person’s operating system on the computer for sharing within a local network. A second model is the most common. It is called the client-server. The content is stored in the server and sent to each user separately. A third model is the peer to peer. This is two users exchanging data directly between each other.
Farber stressed that illegal downloading is taken seriously on campus but is not a big priority. There are more urgent problems on campus which are on the forefront.
“We have honest- to- God dangerous problems, real physical emergencies. This is a white collar crime, like drinking a beer at Kam’s,” said Farber. “But we are educators. We want people to make good decisions. It is theft.”



Sources

Mike Corn
mcorn@illinois.edu
1-217-265-0588

Brian Farber
bfarber@illinois.edu
1-217-333-3680

Kara Kopija
Kkopija2@illinois.edu
1-815-207-3309

Edgar Solomonik
Edgar.solomonik@gmail.com
1-312-213-2943

Victoria Stanton
ensaladera@yahoo.com
1-847-431-5506

RIAA’s Website
http://riaa.org

MPAA’s website (statistic)
http://www.mpaa.org/leksummaryMPA revised.pd

Northern Star
http://www.northernstar.info/article.php?id=6519

Digital Journal
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/271091

CITES
http://www.cites.illinois.edu/security/filesharing/

Student Code
http://www.admin.uiuc.edu/policy/code/article_1/a1_1-302.html

For torrent and MAC address definitions
http://wikipedia.org/