Penn State Pulls The P2P Plug

Just a few weeks after the Recording Industry Association of America hit four college students with anti-piracy lawsuits for peer-to-peer file swapping, Penn State University decided to cut their campus P2Pers off at the cyberpass before the RIAA got any ideas about doing it for them.

Penn State had warned all 110,000 of its students last month that the university was all but imposing a zero-tolerance policy on P2Ping. The university also dedicated a page of its Website to dealing with intellectual property rights and P2P swapping's illegalities. Now, published reports say the university disconnected 220 Penn State students who were found P2Ping copyrighted digital files from their dormitories through the campus computer network.

Penn State's campus newspaper, the Daily Collegian, said 175 of the 220 file swappers were located at the Penn State campus in University Park. The university's office of judicial affairs caught the file swappers on April 14, and will hear each of their cases, the Collegian said.

But while Penn State may or may not have pre-empted the RIAA from hitting either the university or its students with legal action, Michigan Technological University didn't quite escape - and wasn't quite amused, either. One of the four students the RIAA slapped with a lawsuit in early April was an MTU student, Joe Nievelt. MTU president Curtis Tompkins fired off a testy letter to the RIAA earlier this month, accusing the trade association of ignoring his school's work at curbing illegal P2Ping.

Tompkins's letter, in fact, all but said the RIAA's behavior suggested less interest in protecting intellectual property than taking its pounds of flesh. "I believe that we would not be facing this situation with Joseph Nievelt today," Tompkins wrote, "had we been able to gain your help in providing additional information to our student body. We have cooperated fully with the RIAA, but in recent months, have not seen the same from your organization."

Tompkins's letter charged the RIAA knew about the Nievelt situation for "quite some time" before finally filing suit against the student, and that MTU would have shut Nievelt - and any P2Per - off its campus network, had the RIAA followed its own previously established procedures when notifying an individual or organization about illegal file swapping.

"As a fully cooperating site, we would have expected the courtesy of being notified early and allowing us to take action following established procedures," Tompkins wrote, "instead of allowing it to get to the point of lawsuits and publicity."

Daniel Peng, a Princeton University student, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute students Jesse Jordan and Aaron Sherman were accused, as was Nievelt, of operating campus computer networks the RIAA called "Napsters," after the famed file-swapping Internet site. The RIAA wants the four to pony up $150,000 per song for every song traded over their networks, according to the filing against the four.

The Penn State P2Pers can't exactly say they weren't warned. The university vice provost, Rodney A. Erickson, distributed a March 31 memo in which he all but threatened Penn State would punish P2P violators and even bring law enforcement in on them. "In recent years, high-speed computer networks and personal computers have made it easy to copy computer programs, movies, and recordings," Erickson's memo said. "Most of this material is copyrighted, which means the right to make copies is restricted. Making copies of any copyrighted material without the right to do so is against both state and federal law and University policy. Most people who make illegal copies know it is wrong, but are unaware of how severe the penalties can be."

Whether Penn State pre-empting their 220 P2Pers will pre-empt any or all of those students from RIAA litigation, however, remains to be seen. A few months back, the RIAA got agreements from college and university administrators to crack down on student P2Ping. But what happens when administrators like MTU's Tompkins can all but accuse the association of having the proverbial itchy trigger finger when it comes to litigating against the swappers?

"These systems are best described as 'local area Napster networks,'" said RIAA president Cary Sherman about the campus P2P networking, when announcing the Nievelt, Peng, Jordan and Sherman lawsuits. "The court ruled that Napster was illegal and shut it down. These systems are just as illegal and operate in just the same manner. And just like Napster, they hurt artists, musicians, songwriters, those who invest in their work and the thousands of others who work to bring music to the public."