iCopy: The debate about digital media

Debates about the ethics of file sharing have been ongoing in the digital world for as long as technologies have been available to make it possible. Musicians and record companies alike have spent exhaustive amounts of money and time trying to catch computer pirates in the act of illegally sharing music, movies and other information. Still, these efforts haven't stopped the increasing trend of illicit downloading, and many consumers feel it is their right to share property and distribute information freely.

In response to customer complaints about the limitations of music sharing, Apple recently announced a new plan to sell iTunes songs free of copying restrictions for a one-time fee of an extra 30 cents per song or 30 percent of the album price. Additionally, the uniform price of 99 cents for songs will no longer be the standard as newer media will be priced at $1.29 and old favorites will drop to 69 cents.

Three of the four major music labels -- Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group -- will begin selling music through iTunes without digital rights management (DRM) software, the technology which controls the copying and use of digital files. The fourth label, EMI, was already doing so.

Insiders hope that the appeal of easy sharing, higher-priced hits and affordable oldies will revitalize the ailing music industry, and many consumers have been looking forward to this change for quite some time.

"There was a large public outcry against the DRM," said one sophomore who prefers to remain anonymous. "It's been a really big issue: people not having the freedom to move about their music as they see fit, because they thought they owned it after purchasing it. They considered it an infringement on their rights."

Some believe it is their right to have control over all forms of their copy.

"If I buy a song, I expect to be able to use it on an unlimited number of computers or give it to my friend or whatever, and not just [be] able to use it on five computers," sophomore Iris D. said. "I think that's just crazy."

Many musicians, however, do not share this sentiment, as they rely on the DRM to regulate distribution.

"From what I have heard and read on this new policy, I see no benefit to the artist, the creator, the one who should be deciding," musician Joey Vellucci told the Daily in an e-mail. "If I sell you a song for 99 cents, and it is only one copy that I sold you, I would be pretty upset if you copied that song and gave it to 50 or your friends. Now I have lost 50 sales of my song and you just gave what is mine away for free. The DRM is the only thing out there protecting me from being robbed."

Apple's relationship with DRM is only a small part of the problems that have arisen from digitally copied music. File sharing is still very common, especially among college students. With so many ways to not pay for music, few people decide to shell out the dough for their copy.

"If I had to pay for every single song I owned, that would just be a ton of money I don't have to spend on music," Dupanovic said. "So I don't think [downloading music is] wrong."

On the Tufts campus, hundreds of students are reported each year for illegal file sharing. Students are not commonly caught for illegal downloading -- taking music from other users -- but rather for illegally uploading files to others.

"A user can be caught as soon as the file sharing software is installed and running," Judi Rennie, supervisor of Tufts OnLine, told the Daily in an e-mail. "These incidents have nothing to do with quantity or length of time a user has been sharing. This past fall we got our first notification from a copyright holder just 11 hours after the user set up their machine on our network. Others that have been reported to us have noted that they only downloaded one song."

Tufts OnLine receives complaints from copyright holders who are constantly searching the Internet for violators in a surprisingly low-tech way.

"The copyright holders and their agents use exactly the same method as students do to find music," Rennie said. "They install and run the same programs and search for music, movies [or] software belonging to them. When they find it, they get a snapshot of the download and any other materials that may belong to the same copyright owner, and they send notices to us based on the IP address the download came from."

After researching the complaint, Tufts OnLine notifies the student by restricting his or her Internet access. The anonymous sophomore was caught downloading a movie during a summer program.

"I plugged in my computer and went online to check my courses -- and wait one minute -- I have no Internet access," the sophomore said. "So I called them up and they were like, you need to come in and take a little course. They made us watch this movie that I believe was funded by the RIAA [Recording Industry Association of America] or something of the sort. 'Is it OK to download music?' was essentially the discussion among the various students, but of course there was the bias against downloading music."

According to Rennie, this is the only punishment for a first-time offender. A second-time offender gets Disciplinary Probation Level 1 and a formal complaint filed with the Dean of Students Office, and loses on-campus internet for six months. The third time a student is caught, he or she is put on Disciplinary Probation Level 2 and is permanently disallowed the usage of a personally owned machine on the Tufts data network.

"I think they were as fair as they could be," the sophomore said. "They have to protect themselves as a university, and it is an illegal thing to do, so I think the school did what they needed to do. I saw no problems with it; they handled it reasonably."

This punishment, however, did not stop him from continuing to download some files.

"It deterred me from downloading certain types of things. I was more cautious," he said. "They really monitor the big-ticket items just because it's impossible to monitor the thousands of gigabytes of music and movies and information that [are] being transferred illegally."

Not all file sharing is illegal, and Tufts is supportive of certain types. Certain peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing has an academic purpose.

"Right now Tufts does not block ports that would carry P2P traffic on our network," Rennie said. "Often students are sharing files they are working on with other students that may or may not be at the same college. For this P2P is a fabulous tool. Unfortunately it's more often used to file-share music, movies, software and the like."

Despite the potential benefits of these options, the revised Higher Education Act says that universities must implement network-based tools to catch all types of file sharing. Tufts has not yet conformed to this policy but eventually will be legally bound to do so.

Ultimately, the decision to make and distribute copies comes down to the beliefs of the user.

"We all have to ask ourselves at some point, 'Is it OK for me to just decide that I can distribute or take someone else's intellectual property without paying for it?'" Rennie said. "Me? I buy my music; the artists deserve compensation for their work."