Q&A

To Share or Not to Share

Provost Charles Phelps is at the forefront of a national effort to curb the use of campus computer networks to share unauthorized copies of music and movies. Interview by Scott Hauser

Phelps

If Provost Charles Phelps can tell you the difference between Kazaa, Grokster, Morpheus, and other programs used to share digital files of music and movies, it’s not because he spends too much time surfing the Internet. But Phelps, who has a long interest in making more scholarly work available on the Web, has spent many hours during the past year analyzing how such file-sharing programs—known as peer-to-peer (P2P) systems because they allow users to trade files without having to go through a mediating centralized computer network—are used on university campuses.

He chairs a task force on technology that is part of a larger national committee, the Joint Committee on Peer-to-Peer File Sharing, made up of educational administrators and representatives from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The group was convened in 2002 to recommend ways to control unauthorized file sharing over campus networks.

Early in the spring semester, Phelps announced that Rochester is partnering with Napster, an Internet-based digital music service, to give students access to music files that they can download legally. The partnership makes Rochester the first private university in the country to make such a service available to its students.

Why is Rochester providing a digital music service?
There are a number of reasons why this is an attractive alternative. We know that students at Rochester—like students at campuses around the country—are very interested in music and in technology, and we know that they are frequent users of P2P programs. If students have a legal and convenient way to download music, they reduce their legal risks of violating copyright laws. Another benefit is that the service may help us better manage the University’s network bandwidth. As file sharing has become more prevalent, we have seen the percentage of our bandwidth being used to share music files, for example, grow to the point that such traffic often slows the network’s responsiveness, making it difficult for other users to get their work done.

How does the service work?
Students receive a membership in the service and have access to the service’s music files just as other members do. Students will have to pay the per-song or per-album cost of buying the music. Right now, the going rate is about 99 cents per song, but I’m confident that as the market for these services grows, competition will bring that price down considerably.

When could students see such a service?
We are beginning to offer the service this semester after a long period of negotiation and discussion with several companies.

Who has access?
We are making the service part of ResNet, the network that provides Internet access to students (nearly all of whom are undergraduates in the College or at the Eastman School of Music) in the residence halls.

How much does the service to cost and how is it being paid for?
Napster’s Premium Service costs $9.95 a month for the general public, but because of the large volume of customers represented by students at Rochester, we have negotiated a discount on the monthly access fee.
   During an initial period running through the 2005 spring semester, the monthly cost will be funded by the University, not by individual students. We also do not expect the service to affect the student activity fee next year.
   At the end of next spring, the service will be evaluated, and as part of that process, I hope to discuss with student leaders the ways we might pay for the service in the future.

What were you looking for—and notlooking for—in a music service?
We were shopping, so to speak, for the same attributes as most consumers: convenience, affordability, breadth of choice in the company’s catalog, compatibility with our computer systems. We were not interested in services that only allow students to stream music to their desktops. We want students to be able to buy the files and to be able store the music on their hard drives and to burn the files (at least once) onto other storage media. We also do not plan to make the system available on the University’s wireless network.

Where does Rochester fit into the scope of the problems the national committee has been examining?
I don’t think our students are particularly overactive in the sharing of files, but it’s clear from watching the traffic on our networks that a lot of file sharing goes on. The joint committee has been focusing on university and college networks because campuses have, by and large, very high bandwidth. That capacity to transmit large files, along with interest in music among students, makes college campuses a natural area of concern for the recording industries.

How is P2P file sharing different from trading cassette tape recordings of music or videotaped movies? Such recordings are taken for granted now, but the recording and motion picture industries fought those technologies as well.
Well, first of all, unless approved, the file sharing violates the copyright laws of our country. Universities have an enormous stake in copyright in general —we stand uniquely as both major users of copyrighted material (books, journals, and the like) and as producers of such material, not only through our scholarly publications, textbooks, and the like, but also because we have a very active community of scholars creating new music (composers at the Eastman School, most prominently) and performing it (faculty and student groups, for example).
   The shift to digital recording technologies dramatically alters an economic problem for creators of recordings. With videocassettes and cassette tapes, people soon realized that each subsequent copy of a song or movie degraded in quality on those old analog technologies. But with digital recording, copying creates absolutely no diminution of quality.

Aren’t there legitimate reasons to download a copy of a movie or recorded music? For example, a faculty member who is writing about the work of François Truffaut might want a copy of each of the director’s movies in order to study the films at convenient times rather than having to schedule time at the library.
This brings up the whole area of “fair use” (and other related aspects of copyright law). The law defines legitimate uses of copyrighted materials for teaching and scholarship, and within that context, there may be legitimate reasons to download a copy of a piece of music or a movie, but it’s not automatically legal. (The University’s statement and policy on fair use is available at www.lib. rochester.edu/copyright/urpolic.htm.)

What do you think the future holds for the issues the committee has been studying?
Wow, if I knew that for sure, I’d be rich! One thing that almost everybody agrees—including the RIAA people—is that the music industry (and pretty soon, the movie industry) needs a new business model. I’m just not smart enough to figure out what that looks like. Providing a legitimate file-sharing system to our students, at a modest fee, might be one alternative. The committee is continuing to investigate other new technologies as well.
   But we also need to work on educating campus communities, including both existing and new students every year. Many students don’t think that file sharing is illegal, but most of the time, it is. Some know that it’s illegal, but justify it by noting that “everybody does it.” In my mind, that is a poor intellectual justification for an illegal activity. We have had similar educational efforts on university campuses about copyright in general (in the good old days of paper copies), and on the topic of alcohol use. What we’ve learned from these efforts will probably help us find better approaches to the educational efforts we must undertake concerning P2P file sharing.