States Push Colleges to Fight Online Piracy

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By ANDREA L. FOSTER

Higher-education officials say that the entertainment industry is pushing for state laws that would force colleges to police their networks for illegal trading of music and video files and to buy software to stem the problem.

Lawmakers in Tennessee and Illinois recently considered such legislation, and a similar bill may be brewing in California, according to officials who spoke at a technology-policy conference in Arlington, Va., this month. The conference was sponsored by Educause, the nonprofit higher-education-technology group.

College officials were advised by Educause leaders to watch for lobbying efforts in state capitols across the country by the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America. The attendees were told to prepare to start a counterattack, which would involve telling state lawmakers that the bills would be burdensome and costly for colleges, and would be ineffective in preventing students from swapping music and movie files on their campuses.

A spokeswoman for the recording-industry group, Cara Duckworth, would neither confirm nor deny that the group is singling out state legislatures.

"We value our relationships with higher-education officials and are always looking for opportunities to work directly with universities on an appropriate and customized approach to curbing piracy," said Ms. Duckworth in an e-mail interview.

The entertainment industry has complained to federal lawmakers for years that colleges are not doing enough to curb peer-to-peer trading of music and video files via their networks. The industry maintains that college students bear much of the responsibility for the activity nationwide. (See article on Page A11.) But college officials say that industry data are unreliable and that piracy happens everywhere on the Internet, not just at colleges.

At the Educause conference, college technology officials expressed frustration about fighting antipiracy bills in state legislatures. Most are already aware of legislation pending in the Congress that could force colleges to install detection software on campus networks. The measure is under discussion as part of the higher-education reauthorization bill.

Thomas S. Danford, chief information officer of the Tennessee Board of Regents, described how he and other higher-education officials in the state successfully fought what they saw as the most onerous provisions of a state antipiracy bill. A lobbyist for the RIAA, who previously worked for Tennessee's governor, pushed the bill, Mr. Danford said. It would have forced public colleges to analyze their networks for transmission of copyrighted material. Institutions would have been asked to prove to the Tennessee higher-education commission that each college had not received 10 or more infringement notices from owners of copyrighted works. Failing that, colleges would have to install antipiracy software on their networks.

Mr. Danford said he and other critics of the legislation told lawmakers that the bill was flawed because it failed to distinguish between legal and illegal peer-to-peer traffic. Critics also said the bill would cost colleges millions of dollars and would essentially turn administrators into online police officers.

The amended bill, which was signed into law and took effect this month, will require private and public colleges to develop and "reasonably implement" policies to deter students from online infringement of copyrighted works. Colleges that have received 50 or more infringement notices in the past year are required to "reasonably attempt" to prevent infringement over their networks.

An official at the University of California at Los Angeles noted there was a recent informational hearing at the State Capitol on an anti-piracy law. And in Illinois, lawmakers are considering a bill to deter online swapping of music files on college campuses. The bill specifies that a public college must install antipiracy software if it has received at least 10 infringement notices.

In recent weeks, the RIAA has greatly increased the number of infringement notices to colleges, though officials insist that the spike in notifications has nothing to do with their legislative and legal battles.

At the behest of lawmakers, Walter L. Czerniak, associate vice president for information technology at Northern Illinois University, has met with lobbyists for the entertainment industry to see if the bill can be made more palatable to colleges.

But despite his efforts, he said, the lobbyists have refused to modify the legislation. "We will continue fighting," he said.