After reading Monday’s article on file sharing, I share Mr. Czerniak’s concern that the legislation currently being promoted by the content industries would place an unfair burden on universities to police what their students do online. He’s right: the top priority of ITS should be ensuring access to the networks we need for our education, not fretting about whether somebody on them is downloading “There Will Be Blood” without paying for it.

So, why not put your money where your mouth is? The University of Oregon and the University of Washington have both recently declined to forward the RIAA’s letters to students suspected of copyright infringement based partly on the fact that IP addresses do not always correspond nicely to an individual.

In an environment where students share computers and set up ad hoc wireless networks for educational (and, let’s face it, gaming and entertainment) purposes, it’s not always easy to prove, exactly, who did what.

I seem to remember being paired with a roommate freshman year partly because he didn’t own a computer and I did. What, was I supposed to stand over his shoulder while he used it to make sure he didn’t do anything wrong? Perhaps I should have told him, “Sorry, I just can’t bear the thought of you violating someone’s intellectual property! Go downstairs to the lab.”

Now, I’m not a lawyer, so maybe the powers that be find it justifiable to pass on the letters from the content industries to students. Fine. But I find it appalling that students may find themselves without access to the Internet simply because ITS detects an “inordinate amount of activity on a particular IP” that “may or may not have to do with copyright issues.”

After all, file sharing itself is not an unethical, immoral or illegal activity. Neither is the act of downloading.

There are perfectly legitimate reasons one might transfer a lot of data for educational purposes, and I encourage students to investigate for themselves the Internet Archive and Creative Commons, where a plethora of information and digital media is freely available and freely distributed.

And while I would imagine those of us streaming HD broadcasts of “The Office” (perfectly legal) are slowing down the network, those who download episodes on BitTorrent (not so legal) are too. We can help our students understand this difference and ask them to be responsible, or we can continue to be a patsy for The Man and perform somebody else’s police work.

“For some reason, [the MPAA have] decided we are weak,” Czerniak said. I don’t know – suspending students from the network without concrete evidence that they’ve broken the law seems pretty bold to me. If I still lived in the residence halls, I’d be terrified. The absence of due process is scary indeed.

John Benson
Graduate student, English

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