Many universities are lax in their enforcement of digital piracy laws, said the congressman who *A recent congressional subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, asked the Government Accountability Office to create a report measuring and ranking the effectiveness of colleges' anti-piracy efforts.
The announcement followed a special hearing of the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property with testimony given by a panel of entertainment and college officials.
The witnesses included the Movie Producers Association of America, music subscription service Ruckus and officials from UT and the University of Florida.
The hearing was an opportunity to gather information on how universities address illegal downloading and file-sharing on campus, Smith said.
Officials praised the University of Florida's Icarus program, which kicks students off Florida's Internet network if the program detects they are connecting to a peer-to-peer program. P2P programs are frequently used for downloading music and movies.
The Icarus program has been labeled "invasive" and "evil" by the University of Florida's own student paper, but the committee considered the program a positive step forward. Smith called the software "great."
Daniel Updegrove, UT-Austin vice president of information technology, was among those who gave testimony and fielded questions. Smith asked Updegrove if the University would consider implementing Icarus, which will be released soon for public use.
Updegrove said the University probably would not use the program because of privacy and academic freedom issues.
"We could eliminate student traffic tickets if we banned cars, but we don't want to go that far," Updegrove said.
Blair Jones, a Smith spokesman, said the congressman was not endorsing any particular product or telling the University what it should do. Smith was simply intrigued by the fact that the University of Florida saved $500,000 from not having to expand the network to deal with the illegal downloading of large files.
"We think that we have an appropriate balance between controlling the cost of network provisions, the behavior on the network and respect for the privacy of users," Updegrove said.
Piracy does hold some hidden benefits that should be capitalized on, said Vijay Mahajan, a UT marketing professor. If piracy helps spread the music of one entertainer to markets normally untapped, and their sales increase by 1 percent or 2 percent, then it doesn't matter who didn't pay for it, because that growth is due in part to those pirates.
"File-sharing is an innovation, and you can't kill it if the consumers want it," Mahajan said.
Smith, in his opening comments, cited a report by the Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities which reported that increased use of hacked versions of iTunes, like myTunes and ourTunes, are also surfacing as real problems.
"Since the University does not monitor what programs are being run on the network, we do not know how prevalent ourTunes or similar software is," Updegrove said.
The report cited by Smith also states that some universities have "yielded to complacency in their methods of addressing piracy on campus."
The University is not complacent in their enforcement against piracy, Updegrove said in an e-mail, citing the "four-pronged" approach UT takes to fight piracy, including copyright information programs, the external bandwidth system, adherence to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the UT System Crash Course on Copyright.
But Updegrove also points out the priorities of the university when dealing with this issue.
"It is not the University's job to act as copyright police. We are not required to do so under federal law, and we do not violate privacy and academic freedom of our students, faculty and staff, which would be required to determine how they are using the network," Updegrove said.
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