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US House committee discusses college piracy solutions

Leader: The US House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee met with the RIAA and other representatives yesterday to discuss how to solve the problem of piracy on college campuses, which included a proposal to implement expensive P2P filters.

US Representative Ric Keller (R-FL) says that "the hammer’s coming" regarding the "problem" of piracy on US college campuses—a popular focus point lately in the fight against piracy, ranging from the release of the RIAA's list of top piracy schools to the RIAA's recent antipiracy campaign on college campuses. The statement was made during a hearing with the US House's Judiciary Committee yesterday, who met with RIAA representatives and discussed possible solutions to curbing piracy at colleges and universities.

"I would very much like to tell you today that we have made progress on this issue. In many ways we have. But, unfortunately, this illegal activity still permeates college life, and only a handful of university administrations have begun to take seriously the reality of its repercussions," RIAA's Cary Sherman told the committee. The RIAA recently sent 400 prelitigation notices to 13 different US universities, threatening legal action against currently-anonymous individuals unless the students choose to settle first. While some universities were happy to comply, others have been less willing to bend to the RIAA's demands to forward on the notices. Sherman cited data saying that over half of college students download illegal material—mostly through P2P networks—and argued that universities should implement filtering technologies to limit P2P use.

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cGrid stuff

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One of the filters proposed during the hearing was cGrid, a technology developed by the University of Florida under the name "Icarus" but now licensed by a company called Red Lambda. The company describes cGrid as "the industry's most advanced P2P and file-sharing mitigation technology," which makes use of both packet and behavioral analysis to determine whether individual users are participating in illegal file sharing. The software can provide detailed usage reports to administrators, which could then be used to dicipline students who have had multiple infractions. However, one of the most interesting features of the software is its ability to kick users off of the network for illegally downloading files, based on preferences set by the system administrator.

Red Lambda says that cGrid supports "a large variety of different P2P clients, in addition to other avenues of file-sharing including Windows file sharing, FTP, IM, and others," and that cGrid does not perform content inspection but instead focuses on the behavior of the protocol—"not the particular movie or song that is being transferred." But the company does not expand on how it differentiates between legitimate uses of those technologies and illegal ones, raising questions of its effectiveness in an academic setting where students may be using P2P and other services potentially flagged by the system for legitimate, academic reasons.

cGrid is, of course, lauded by the RIAA and MPAA because of its ability to automatically determine usage patterns and remove offenders' Internet access on the spot, without the lag of involving university bureaucracy. The University of Florida itself reports that it has been using cGrid in its dorm networks since 2003 with some success. While students have been finding some ways around the service (as discussed, perhaps not too brightly, on Facebook), UF's interim CIO Marc Hoit told gainesville.com that the university has seen a dramatic reduction in downloading. Instantly kicking them off the Internet for infractions seems to work too, saying that "The first and second warnings are sufficient" in scaring students straight about piracy.

Red Lambda's CEO Greg Marchwinski testified at the hearing, saying "I think the congressmen in this committee are losing their patience." Red Lambda would undoubtedly love for Congress to mandate universities to install such a solution, with its $1 million price tag for installation and $250,000 yearly operation costs... per university. There are other concerns for cGrid as well, including infringing student privacy and stifling the creativity of students who might be working on cutting-edge projects. The Executive Vice President of the Association of American Universities, John Vaughn, testified that the cost of such a system would be prohibitively expensive (to say the least) and that universities were already making an effort to curb piracy in other ways.

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