Med students hoist P2P Jolly Roger to get access to papers - Ars Technica

Med students hoist P2P Jolly Roger to get access to papers - Ars Technica 

Med students hoist P2P Jolly Roger to get access to papers A study provides evidence that file sharing takes place with some very specialized media: the research papers published in scientific journals. By John Timmer | Last updated October 29, 2009 6:15 AM CT

The ease with which information can be spread through the Internet has exacerbated tensions among those who pay for, conduct, and publish scientific research. Many journals still require subscription or per-article payments for access to the research they publish, which often leaves the public, who funds a significant percentage of the research, on the wrong side of a pay wall. So far, however, there's been little evidence that the public has been interested enough in research to engage in the sort of widespread file-sharing that plague other content industries. But a new study suggests that may just be because nobody's looked very carefully.

The study, which was spotted by TechDirt, appears in an open-access journal, so anyone can read its entire contents. It describes the sharing of over 5,000 research papers on a site frequented by medical professionals, and the formal community rules that governed the exchange.

During the six months in 2008 that the author tracked the activity on the site, which was a discussion board focused on medical fields, it had over 125,000 registered users. Anyone could start an account, but many of the fora were focused on specific issues, such as those faced by nurses and residents. In addition to those, however, there was a section called the Electronic Library that contained a forum called "Databases & Journals—Requests and Enquiries."

Up to three times a day, users were allowed to submit a request for a published research article, accompanied by a link to the free abstract hosted at the journal's website. Other users would then download the full article and host it somewhere, providing a link in the discussion. If everything was set up properly, the site would track the number of downloads.

Over the course of six months, over 6,500 articles were requested, and over 80 percent of those requests were successfully filled. The articles received a mean of 4.47 views, with one attracting 177 downloads. The author found that the requests roughly paralleled the journal's impact factors, with Nature and Science coming out on top, followed by more specialized medical journals. Figuring an average cost of $30 a download (the price requested by many journals), the publishing industry was potentially losing $1.4 million a year due to the site, although it's unlikely that many of the downloaders would have actually exercised their option to buy an article.

According to the author, the site (which is never named) went inactive in early 2009, although its contents were indexed via Google prior to that point.

The author considers this behavior in the context of the Open Access debate, which has played out in Congress and research institutions. He also terms the file sharing behavior among people involved in the medical profession "ethically dubious," given it involves the distribution of copyrighted material.

There is, however, an alternate way of viewing this that the author doesn't discuss: at least some medical professionals are apparently unable to obtain the publications they feel are needed for their training or practice; given their job responsibilities, it seems unethical to withhold these materials.

In addition, it's worth noting that, although this sort of informal sharing would be obviated if all research was open access, it has a very different history from the formal open access movement. For many years, it was traditional for anyone publishing a paper to order a stack of what were termed "reprints"—essentially the journal article without the rest of the journal's contents—from the publisher, in order to share with colleagues or anyone who was interested, but did not have access to the journal. With the advent of digital publishing, this sort of service shifted to the emailing of PDFs—in a lot of ways, the file sharing seen here could be viewed as the next logical step in this publication sharing process.

In any case, the amount of sharing that goes on is undoubtedly much larger than the file exchanges observed in the study. Many authors are now choosing to simply place articles where anyone can find them, either ahead of print at places like the arXiv, or after, on their university's servers. Offers to share paywalled articles also occur in public forums that aren't dedicated to this exchange, at least based on some of the comments attached to Ars' science articles.

Many publishers are readily adapting to and, in some cases, embracing the increased demands for public access to research results. But there remain a number who are resisting the trend. The study suggests that publishers might do well to adopt some sort of formalized access system, or they may end up facing a growth in the sites that encourage the same sort of sharing that has caused the movie and film industries so much indigestion.

The Internet Journal of Medical Informatics, 2009. DOI unavailable.

Med students hoist P2P Jolly Roger to get access to papers - Ars Technica

Majors Welcome P2P Win, But $1.92M Award Could Make For Bad PR

 Majors Welcome P2P Win, But $1.92M Award Could Make For Bad PR

Majors Welcome P2P Win, But $1.92M Award Could Make For Bad PR
June 18, 2009 - Legal and Management
By Ben Sheffner
The recording industry secured a resounding victory when a Minnesota jury awarded the four major labels $1.92 million in damages after unanimously finding that Jammie Thomas-Rasset had willfully infringed on their copyrights by downloading and sharing 24 songs on the Kazaa peer-to-peer network.
The mammoth size of the verdict, representing $80,000 per track, may help dissuade more P2P users from illegally downloading music, and for that the labels are happy. "We appreciate the jury's service and that they take this as seriously as we do," RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth said in a statement.
"We are pleased that the jury agreed with the evidence and found the defendant liable."
But a question arose after the verdict about whether the sheer size of the damages could lead to a backlash against an industry that is already portrayed in some quarters as overreaching.
No one expects that the four major labels, all plaintiffs in the case, will collect the entire amount from Thomas-Rasset, a 32-year-old Brainerd, Minn., mother of four who testified during the retrial that her ex-boyfriend or sons, then 8 and 10, were most likely responsible for downloading and distributing the songs. Thomas-Rasset lost her previous trial in 2007 and was ordered to pay $222,000, only to achieve a now-pyrrhic victory when the court tossed the verdict because of a faulty jury instruction.
The RIAA's Duckworth indicated after the verdict that the recording industry doesn't intend to collect $1.92 million from Thomas-Rasset. "Since day one, we have been willing to settle this case and we remain willing to do so," she said.
This could help the labels avoid potential political and legal headaches stemming from the large verdict. Even for law-abiding citizens who believe that labels have every right to protect their copyrights, a verdict of almost $2 million could be hard to swallow.
The Copyright Act provides for awards of statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work, in the case of willful infringement. A number of copyright scholars on the "copyleft," led by Harvard Law School's Charles Nesson, have argued that such damages awards for personal use of file-sharing networks are excessive. Though no court has yet adopted that theory, the Thomas-Rasset verdict provides a very human face to the argument, which she will likely pursue on appeal if the case isn't settled.
While the recording industry maintains strong support in Congress, with powerful champions including House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., and his Senate counterpart Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the Minneapolis verdict could well lead to a legislative move to reduce the damages awards available against individual infringers like Thomas-Rasset.
Thomas-Rasset's attorney, Kiwi Camara, said he was "very surprised" by the size of the verdict and signaled a willingness to talk about a possible settlement with the labels. But Camara also listed a number of potential issues to appeal should the parties be unable to resolve the case, including a challenge to the labels' ownership of the copyrights at issue based on the argument that they were improperly classified as "works made for hire" in contravention of the Copyright Act of 1976.
Ben Sheffner is a copyright attorney who blogs at copyrightsandcampaigns.blogspot.com. Previously, while employed at 20th Century Fox, he worked on an amicus curiae brief in this case for the Motion Picture Assn. of America.

Majors Welcome P2P Win, But $1.92M Award Could Make For Bad PR

Copyrights & Campaigns: No settlement in Jammie Thomas case; retrial set for June 15 in peer-to-peer case

Copyrights & Campaigns: No settlement in Jammie Thomas case; retrial set for June 15 in peer-to-peer case 

No settlement in Jammie Thomas case; retrial set for June 15 in peer-to-peer case

Back to Duluth!
The eyes of the copyright world will once again be focused on that northern Minnesota burg after a court-ordered settlement conference failed to resolve the Jammie Thomas peer-to-peer infringement case -- the only one of the approximately 30,000 cases filed by the labels against individual p2p users that has actually gone to trial so far.
Reports Wired:

Thomas’ lawyer, Brian Toder, and RIAA lawyers met privately in a Minnesota federal court for two hours haggling over the case. No conclusion was reached (.pdf). Thomas has maintained she would never settle. A retrial is set for June 15.

“What they wanted to do, my client did not want to do,” Toder said in a telephone interview. He declined to disclose the RIAA’s financial demands.

The first Thomas trial ended in late 2007 with a verdict for the plaintiffs and a $222,000 statutory damages award against Thomas for infringing 24 songs. Thomas claimed that a mysterious lurker had used her wireless network to download the songs, but, as Wired deadpanned at the time:

Expert testimony from an RIAA witness...showed that a wireless router was not used, casting doubt on her defense that a hacker lurking outside her apartment window with a laptop might have framed her, he said.

One juror called Thomas a "liar" in a post-verdict press interview, and 2 wanted to impose maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per work before the jury settled on the figure of $9,250. However, the court threw out the entire verdict after determining that his jury instruction on the so-called "making available" theory of liability was foreclosed by Eighth Circuit precedent.
June could be an awfully busy month for the labels' litigators; Judge Nancy Gertner in the Joel Tenenbaum case has told the parties to expect trial date as early as late June, though I suspect that delays produced by the webcast imbroglio will necessitate pushing that out.

Copyrights & Campaigns: No settlement in Jammie Thomas case; retrial set for June 15 in peer-to-peer case

The Chronicle: Daily news: 04/04/2002 -- 02

 The Chronicle: Daily news: 04/04/2002 -- 02

New Software Blocks Trades of Music and Video Files Outside the Campus Network

By SCOTT CARLSON

Call it diet KaZaA -- plenty of file-sharing power, less bandwidth hassle.

A new file-sharing program called Phynd is burrowing in at a handful of

universities, including the University of Connecticut, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Unlike KaZaA and other file-sharing programs, which allow users to find and trade MP3 files or video files across the Internet, Phynd limits its searches and its users to computers on the network on which the program is running. University of Connecticut students, for example, won't find an MP3 on a computer in Illinois; and an MP3 hunter at the University of Chicago can't get access to the Phynd search engine at UConn.

Phynd's local orientation is good news for college computer-system officers and for students who want to get a quicker MP3 fix. File sharing can clog an institution's connection to the Internet, forcing activity to a near halt. But many internal campus networks are significantly more robust than their Internet connections.

Paul Kobulnicky, vice chancellor for information services at Connecticut, calls Phynd an "interesting adaptation" in the ever-evolving world of file sharing. MP3-hungry students often dodge university-imposed bandwidth restrictions to get digitized music and video. "What you're finding is that kids are aware of the effect that they are having on local networks, but they are also aware of what we are doing to control it," Mr. Kolbulnicky says. "Whatever it is they want to share, they've realized that they can share it more effectively if they localize it."

Brent Holden, a junior and computer-engineering major, set up a Phynd server "as a hobby" in his dormitory room at UConn. According to statistics on the Phynd page, about 350,000 searches for MP3 files have been performed through Mr. Holden's server since late February. By comparison, the Phynd server at the Rochester Institute of Technology has performed about 17,000 searches.

"I didn't mean for it to get as popular as it did," Mr. Holden says.

The University of Connecticut shut down Mr. Holden's server for a few days to study the situation, then allowed it to go back up. Mr. Kobulnicky says that servers are allowed to exist at the university if they don't serve material to users outside of the network. The rule is meant to thwart use of the university network for commercial ventures. He says people often run servers inside the network for clearly educational purposes.

Although Phynd's local orientation makes it easier on an institution's Internet connection than other file-sharing programs, it's unclear whether that makes the program more acceptable from a legal perspective.

"It's a totally different legal realm when you're talking about a local-area network as opposed to the entire Internet," Mr. Holden asserts. Because you might know the person who's downloading an MP3 off your computer, he says, "the rules are a little different."

"It's still peer-to-peer file sharing, but it could be the friend right across the hall from you or another person in your dorm," he says.

Brendan P. Conte, one of Phynd's developers, agrees. "The whole legal issue, as I interpret it, is opening sharing to everyone," says Mr. Conte, a senior majoring in computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "At least that's what I'm hoping," he adds. Mr. Conte says that there is a dormant portion of the Phynd program that will support off-campus sharing, "but if you enable it, you're going to be liable for what happens."

However, not everyone is so sure that keeping sharing local makes it legal. "Our institution's position is that sharing is sharing, and if it's illegal at any point it's illegal at all points," Mr. Kobulnicky says. The exclusive nature of Phynd "raises a specter that bothers me," he says, because it doesn't allow copyright owners to see the use and availability of their material on the network. He wonders if that opens up universities to different kinds of lawsuits than they have faced as a result of earlier file-sharing activity.

"I kind of like having the rights owner being able to poke around and find violations," Mr. Kobulnicky adds. "That way, the rights owner isn't wondering what kind of violations are going on inside my operation."

The Recording Industry Association of America also disapproves of Phynd. In a statement, Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the recording industry, said "the software appears to facilitate the unauthorized copying and distribution of music and other protected content."

"We find this extremely disturbing -- simply restricting this kind of file sharing to a particular network does not make it any less wrong. We would hope that the faculty of the university, who understand the value of protecting copyrighted works, would help put a stop to this. We will discuss this and decide what the best follow-up course of action is."

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The Chronicle: Daily news: 04/04/2002 -- 02