Computer Piracy Rampant at Purchase This Semester

Tim Tomaskovic. Credit: Lisa Eadicicco

When returning to campus after being gone one weekend, junior Tim Tomaskovic checked his email to find out that he has been charged with copyright infringement. Freshman Stephanie Lato received a similar notification. “[CTS] said taking away my laptop might be one of the penalties,” she said.

But Tomaskovic and Lato are only two of the many students that have been reported for allegedly violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). According to CTS Director Bill Junor, there have been 281 reports this semester alone, 120 of which have been identified. This is approximately double the amount of reports that CTS received last semester. “It’s really gotten out of control,” he said.

Under the DMCA, colleges are not held responsible for any copyright infringements as long as they adhere to certain guidelines. Colleges are obligated to notify the owner of the computer in question that the material is trademarked, and to remove the allegedly infringing material.

Junor said that the copyright owners for certain songs and movies hire industry “watchdogs,” who report any acts of piracy to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIA). Although Lato said that she did not download the specified material, according to Junor the reports are always accurate. “We’re never wrong,” he said. “There have been times when people had compelling and believable stories, but the more you look at the information in the complaint, you see that the reports are correct.”

The CTS director provided an example by describing a common scenario. The host name of the computer in question would not match the name of the person that owns that computer. In this case students would come up with excuses such as saying that the host name of the computer was one of their friends, so therefore they are not responsible themselves.

These types of schemes often fail because students don’t realize that their computer is registered by using their college identification (CID) number. “By registering to put one of your friends online, you’re still taking full responsibility for what’s on there,” said Junor. “That’s the closest to being wrong that we’ve ever been.”

When students like Tomaskovic and Lato have been charged with these violations, Student Affairs issues suitable consequences. “There are never any laptops taken away,” said Junor. “We don’t take anything from the students.” Tomaskovic said he was required to complete an online copyright test, and is unable to use any peer-to-peer (P2P) programs for a year.

Tomaskovic used a P2P program called Vuze to illegally upload the material he was caught sharing. “I had just gotten a laptop and wanted to try a new way to download music, so my friend told me about Vuze,” he said. Prior to using this program, Tomaskovic used another popular music sharing program called BitTorrent. “With BitTorrent, you could download an entire discography just by clicking one link,” he said.

Junor said that there are Higher Education Acts that want colleges to take electronic counter measures against copyright infringement. This means that a device would look at everything that goes through your Internet by checking its’ database, and would supposedly stop anything illegal from going through.

However, the problem with this is that P2P softwares are beginning to use encryption, which means that the database would be unreadable and would still get through these devices. “It’s like an arms race, and there’s no single silver bullet technology that’s gonna get us out of this,” Junor said. “It’s a matter of adjusting everyone’s attitude, including the industry’s attitude about how they should make money. “