Two of the recording and music industry's biggest groups are working with an Internet networking organization to find new ways of distributing their music and movie files over the internet.
Earlier this month the Recording Industry Association of America and the Music Picture Association of America joined Internet2, a faster, academic version of the current Internet, which months earlier was blamed by the RIAA for allowing the illegal sharing of media files by hundreds of individuals. According to the RIAA, out of the 14,000 individuals they have sued over the past two years, 880 were university and college internet users.
Five months ago, both media groups sued individuals who used I2's network to allegedly shared copies of media files.
Between July 2004 and August 2005, UT received 307 complaints from the copyright owners against students, according to Dan Updegrove, the VP for Info Tech at UT. In most cases, he said, the complainant will report their issue and the accused's IP address. Then, the university will trace the address back to a person.
University penalties for a first offense consists of the student recognizing that they committed a crime and deleting whatever files they took without permission, he said.
According to UT policy, the university cannot protect students from a copyright complaint.
Lauren Kallens, a spokeswoman for the I2, said that the MPAA and the RIAA are currently studying new technologies around content distribution that can protect and preserve copyrighted material.
"The result of widespread piracy is that the industry loses billions of dollars that they then don't have available to make more movies, People who are movie fans and want to see a variety of movies should know that stealing movies is going to make it more difficult in the future to produce them," said Gayle Osterberg, a spokeswoman for the MPAA,
According to the RIAA spokeswoman, both media groups have yet to start any research projects, but they are looking at other companies within I2 to conduct research with.
I2, led by 207 universities working with corporate and government members, devotes its resources to providing a database that can be used by academics to share research and conduct experiments on internet innovations.
According to Kallens, students from around the world can use I2 to take master classes with world-renowned musicians and artists via DVD quality video conferencing technology.
She said that the Manhattan School of Music regularly teaches master classes via I2 to students around the world that might not otherwise have access to this level of instruction.
UT's President Larry Faulkner, who is the president of I2's board of trustees, said UT uses I2 to collect large amounts of data at the McDonald's Observatory at its regular 10 gigabit per second speed and also plays a part in controlling its instruments from afar.
"The reason we joined I2 was out of the concern that the regular internet was getting congested. It was so wildly popular that it wasn't always possible to do the kind of research we wanted to do," Updegrove said.
He said UT uses I2 to connect to 200 other universities so that academic research can be shared. He also mentioned that UT does not catalog who's using I2 or what they are using it for.
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