UW investigates file sharing

As staff and students go about their daily lives at the UW, hundreds of gigabytes of data filter through the campus computer networks, much of that traffic taking the form of files transferred through Morpheus, LimeWire and other peer-to-peer file-sharing programs.

Although widespread use of media-file trading is by no means unusual on college campuses, the institutional reaction nationwide has varied. The UW seems to fall in line with most schools in neither condoning file sharing nor making broad efforts to prevent it, preferring to deal with copyright violations on a case-by-case basis.

David Mathiesen, a UW senior in psychology and the architect of the popular UW file-sharing community UWTribe, feels that the benefits of legal file sharing outweigh the negative impact of the minority on campus who use such software for illegal means.

"I'm not advocating the sharing of copyrighted material, I advocate file availability," said Mathiesen. "My opinion on file sharing is that it allows people to get access to something they would never otherwise be able to see. The University is an educational environment, and nothing else stimulates the mind in that matter."

The legality of peer-to-peer software has always been questionable -- like their predecessor Napster, today's file-sharing programs grant a user access to millions of songs, movies and other media which is usually protected by copyright law. While some American universities have taken a hard line against the use of such programs by students, UW administrators have been dealing with such problems on a case-by-case basis.

"We've had complaints against students from the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America," said Oren Sreebny, an assistant director at the UW's computing and communications department. "Under the latest revision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, when we receive a properly worded complaint, we are obliged to take immediate action."

Sreebny explained such complaints must be made against specific individuals rather than residence halls or other university departments. He said several such complaints have been lodged over the course of this academic year, but the number, which he could not recall exactly, was not extraordinary.

"It's not happening on a daily basis, " said Sreebny. "We haven't gotten hundreds of complaints."

One reason for the UW's narrow approach to student copyright violation is the role file sharing plays in connecting various artistic communities on campus, which share and trade original works between one another. UWTribe in particular is home to a large group of graphic artists and musicians who would otherwise have few venues through which to make their work public.

"I have never learned as much about 3-D graphics, animation and visual design as I did when I came to the UW," said Mathiesen. "File sharing made it possible for me to learn from hundreds of examples created by people I could actually e-mail and talk to."

At other institutions, however, the situation is considerably different. To combat major file-sharing programs, the University of Illinois has limited the bandwidth available to data-transfer programs like Morpheus. At the University of Oregon and the University of Minnesota, campus computing services have made a point of cautioning students against the use of file sharing software, driving the users of such programs underground.

While UW's Computing & Communications (C&C) staff does not seem considerably worried about large-scale copyright violation by students, it does believe UW students are consuming a disproportionate amount of the University's network resources.

"I don't know if we have specific concerns about legality," Sreebny said. "We are concerned about the amount of bandwidth being consumed by students in the residence halls."

Web servers, file-sharing hubs and online game servers consume large amounts of bandwidth on the network, and Sreebny explained that the last few years have seen an explosion in the number of such applications running from the dorms.

"We want students to be aware that there is a strict policy against running public servers on the University network," said Sreebny.

UWTribe, a service that operates on the University network, is not prohibited by C&C regulations because it is only available to students, requiring UW NetID verification for a new user to open an account.

"Regulations say you may set up a server for campus use, but you're not allowed to have a server that's available off of campus," Mathiesen said. "The core of UWTribe is strictly on campus, and the off-campus protocol it uses is built on top of Dante, a pre-existing UW service that allows connections from off of campus."

UWTribe, like University computing services in general, has a strict policy against the sharing of copyrighted material. While Mathiesen admits that file-sharing networks can be used for illegal purposes, he insists UWTribe crosses no boundaries that other forms of computer networking do not.

"When someone hooks their computer up to the dorm network, they can go through Network Neighborhood and find hundreds of files through the network. In creating UWTribe, I've gone no farther than the individual did in that case."