P2P File Sharing and Articles, Papers, and Reports

A new survey of students found that about a quarter of them reported hunting for an illegal copy of a textbook from pirate Web sites.

The survey was small—only about 500 students from two colleges—but it is one of several indicators that downloading unauthorized textbooks is becoming commonplace at college campuses.

College students are increasingly downloading illegal copies of textbooks online, employing the same file-trading technologies used to download music and movies. Feeling threatened, book publishers are stepping up efforts to stop the online piracy.

"To catch college students trading copyrighted songs online, the Recording Industry Association of America uses the same file-sharing software that online pirates love, an RIAA representative told The Chronicle at the organization's offices during a private demonstration of how it catches alleged music pirates."

Letter sent by USACM, to Congress regarding technology-based filtering of Internet traffic by universities; April 14, 2008.

"File sharing serves as a tuning fork for an entirely new orchestra of digital communication, interaction, and social expectation. We in higher education must provide a clear, calm, ringing voice in defining
the terms of the new world when we believe our goals and values are important not only to us but to society."

The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday overwhelmingly approved a higher-education funding bill that includes controversial new antipiracy obligations for universities.

The 354-58 vote to approve the College Opportunity and Affordability Act leaves intact an entertainment industry-backed provision, which makes up just a tiny part of a bill that has ballooned to more than 800 pages.

"In its campaign urging lawmakers and colleges to take the issue of on-campus illegal file sharing seriously, the Motion Picture Association of America has wielded an array of legal arguments, facts and statistics. It now appears that a central figure in that arsenal was high by a factor of three, galvanizing its opponents who maintain that colleges have been singled out unfairly as havens of downloading activity. "

"In a 2005 study it commissioned, the Motion Picture Association of America claimed that 44 percent of the industry's domestic losses came from illegal downloading of movies by college students, who often have access to high-bandwidth networks on campus.

The MPAA has used the study to pressure colleges to take tougher steps to prevent illegal file-sharing and to back legislation currently before the House of Representatives that would force them to do so.

But now the MPAA, which represents the U.S. motion picture industry, has told education groups a "human error" in that survey caused it to get the number wrong. It now blames college students for about 15 percent of revenue loss."

In an effort to better understand the technologies available for copyright infringement control, the Common Solutions Group invited leading vendors of detection and suppression technologies to present and discuss the architecture and implementation of their products at an intensive workshop held at Virginia Tech on January 9, 2008. This is their summary report.

"As foreshadowed at the Consumer Electronics Show last week, federal regulators this week took the first formal step into investigating complaints about how Internet service providers, such as Comcast, manage peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic on their networks "