Editorial: Unmasking P2P secrets on campuses

"Interesting article on internal university wide p2p sharing" -- Stephen

Editorial: Unmasking P2P secrets on campuses

By Don Tennant

May 5, 2008 (Computerworld) This is coming to you from St. Louis, where I participated in the inaugural Gateway to Innovation conference organized by several local IT associations. With academia well represented at the event, some of the loudest buzz at the conference surrounded the characteristics of students planning to enter the IT profession.

Meanwhile, on campuses all over the country, many of those students are engaged in an activity that no one seems inclined to talk about. On this day, as every day, students are silently stealing property by flagrantly violating copyright law.

Suppose you were a student at one of those universities, with experience in journalism both on a professional level and as a former editor in chief of the school newspaper and an intern at Computerworld. Now, imagine you became aware of an explosive development involving the university's peer-to-peer file-sharing network and its widespread use by students for illegal downloads of copyrighted material.

You know that the development is an important news story for the school paper and perhaps for outside media as well.

But there are at least two problems. For one, you risk becoming a pariah for writing about a topic that many of your classmates want kept out of the spotlight. For another, you're among the large swath of students who engage in illegal downloading, and the story will "out" you.

What would you do?

That's the quandary that my son Dan, a student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, found himself in a couple of weeks ago. It didn't take him long to come to a decision. He wrote the story.

Dan's article recounted the rise and fall of a group of students called The 40 Thieves, whose initial mission was to outsmart WPI's network operations center by countering its measures to block BitTorrent downloads. The 40 Thieves were successful enough to allow a degree of arrogance to set in, and they extended their activities beyond WPI's internal network to include self-credited distribution of illegally sourced content.

That brazen expansion turned out to be ill-advised. With the activity now outside the university's perimeter, the network operations center moved to disable the peer-to-peer network entirely — but not before it had monitored enough to enable it to disband The 40 Thieves.

Dan reported that four of the students were summoned before the campus hearing board and charged with violating the university's code of conduct and acceptable-use policy. When two were tried before the board last month, one was suspended, and the other was put on probation. The other two will be tried early next year. Most of the rest in the group are banned from wireless and residence-hall Internet access for one year.

There's little doubt that there's concern within some quarters on the WPI campus that the development reflects negatively on the school's image. No university wants to be seen as a hotbed of copyright infringement, regardless of how exemplary its handling of the problem might be. So the idea of publicizing the case probably received few ringing endorsements on campus.

It's to WPI's credit that no one in the administration made any attempt to discourage Dan from reporting the story. At this writing, the story has been filed to the school paper, but it has yet to be published. While I assume it will appear on the paper's Web site at some point, I have posted the full story in my blog to ensure that it does see the light of day.

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What's clear from all this is that universities need to be more proactive in dealing with these file-sharing networks. WPI didn't dissuade Dan from writing the story, but there should have been more of an effort to deter students from illegal downloading in the first place.

That means more than the passive act of posting an acceptable-use policy. It means a zero-tolerance policy backed by an ongoing education campaign that makes it more difficult for students to rationalize the acceptability of copyright infringement.

Don Tennant is editorial director of Computerworld and InfoWorld. Contact him at don_tennant@computerworld.com, and visit his blog at http://blogs.computerworld.com/tennant.

Editorial: Unmasking P2P secrets on campuses