Congressmen To Ask For Review Of Higher Ed Antipiracy Efforts

At a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee meeting this week, lawmakers, campus officials, and representatives of the movie industry and of a provider of legal download services discussed efforts by U.S. colleges and universities to curtail copyright violations on their networks. Reps. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) and Howard Berman (D-Calif.) said they will ask the Government Accountability Office to issue a formal report on what effects those efforts have had on student file-trading habits. According to Smith, “We will ask for the report so we can increase the scrutiny and increase the public attention to piracy.” Also at the hearing, Norbert Dunkel, director of housing at the University of Florida, described his institution’s use of an application called Icarus, which automatically restricts usage of the network for students who connect to P2P services. Dunkel said the tool, which the university developed, has led to a 95 percent reduction in outgoing traffic from the university’s network and virtually eliminated notices of copyright infringement. Smith applauded the application, but Daniel Updegrove, vice president for information technology at the University of Texas at Austin, expressed concerns that such a blanket approach to the problem could limit the academic freedom and privacy of students.

Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 September 2005 (sub. req’d)