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Volume CXXXIII, Number 11 |
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Recording industry pressures Administration
EVRON LEGALL
STAFF WRITER
Entertainment industry groups have recently turned up the pressure on the Bowdoin College administration to crack down on illegal file sharing at the College. Mitch Davis, Bowdoin's Chief Information Officer, said that he receives "three or four" notices of copyright infringement from entertainment industry companies daily and went on to say "it has been increasing recently."
Contrary to popular belief, illegal file sharing is not only limited to music files. Bowdoin also regularly receives notices from major film and software companies such as Warner Brothers and Symantec about illegal activities that originate at the College.
Davis said that he thought that Bowdoin's problem with illegal file sharing stemmed primarily from a lack of knowledge on the part of members of the College community as to the seriousness of the situation. He said that this was particularly evident when he met with various student groups such as KASA and LASO in his ongoing effort to ascertain what the community requires of information technology at the College. "Most of them knew what they were doing was wrong but didn't see the harm," he said.
As a result of this, Davis has decided to work with Katy Longley, Senior VP and Treasurer of the college and Craig Bradley, Dean of Student Affairs to come up with a policy to deal with the problem. He stressed that he thought the best approach would be to educate the community on the problem and said that he was confident that most individuals would voluntarily change their behavior if they knew more.
For those students or faculty members that persisted, he proposes a series of warning followed by suspension of internet privileges. One Bowdoin student who lost internet privileges for a week for an illegally downloaded movie said, "Downloading movies is just like a bad habit...it is very hard to get rid of."
He went on to say, "I went to the library a lot that week. I have not downloaded any since. I figure who needs to download movies anyway? If they don't want me to download then I won't."
Some colleges have decided to approach the problem by setting up their networks in such a way as to prevent the transmission of any mp3 or movie files. Even so, Davis says "Some have figured out that by sending files using AOL they could not be monitored."
Davis expressed a desire to have meetings with students to inform them of the problem and to familiarize them with alternatives to illegal sites such as Limewire and Kazaa. He suggested that students could look to websites such as Apple's Itunes.com, Musicmatch and the new Napster. He went on to say that it was even possible for a system to be set up whereby campus IT assistants could walk students through the process if they didn't know how to use such legal services. A spot poll showed a general receptiveness to that idea "If they charge a reasonable price per song, I wouldn't mind paying for music," said Dave Ng, '06.
Head of the Student Computing Committee, Anthony Costa was critical of the RIAA: "If the RIAA wants us to buy the 'music as a commodity thing,' they're going to have to start treating it like one. When purchasing almost any other good (food, clothes, etc.), if it is bad or even doesn't fit right, we expect at the very least an exchange."
He said, however, "the iTunes music store is an
incredible step not only for music lovers, but for the RIAA alike." As for those students that the College has already received notices about, Davis said, "I have a whole list," which he has forwarded to Dean Bradley. "They will be getting a call," he laughed.
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