Colleges join fight against piracy

Students at Wittenberg University were fed up because the school’s computer network was frustratingly slow, so campus officials last week bought a filter to prevent students from unauthorized peer-to-peer file sharing of copyrighted music and movies.

“We got constant calls from students complaining about the speed of the network in our residence halls, and it was because of peer-to-peer traffic,” said Joseph Deck, director of computing services at Wittenberg, a Lutheran school in a working-class, western Ohio town.

Wittenberg and an increasing number of colleges and universities are stepping into the campaign to stop file sharing to protect their computer networks.

Efforts to curb downloading have been carried out largely by the Recording Industry Association of America, the Washington trade group for record labels. The group has sued nearly 3,000 people, including several students, since it began a legal campaign last year to slow file sharing and protect music sales.

Now campus officials are getting involved.

“We are intensely concerned about downloading movies and music impairing the ability of faculty and students to do their academic work,” said Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel of the American Council on Education, which represents 1,800 colleges and universities.

Overloaded campus networks can slow everything from sending e-mail to checking course materials and registering for classes.

More than a dozen colleges have turned to Audible Magic Corp., a Los Gatos, Calif., firm that began marketing a filter in December that blocks copyrighted songs from being downloaded onto networks. The device scans song and movie files and checks each against a database of about 4 million copyrighted works.

If it determines one is copyrighted, the filter blocks a transfer.

File-sharing programs “are really hogs on the network,” said Jonathan Breitbarth, director of computer services at Concordia University, a private Lutheran school in St. Paul, Minn., with 900 students.

A report last month by the General Accounting Office found the fight to stop file sharing costs some schools hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In a survey of 13 colleges and universities, the GAO found two schools have spent more than $250,000 on technical controls to limit the practice.

Concordia spent $10,000 in March to install Audible Magic’s filter, which costs as much as $40,000, depending on the size of a school’s network.

Wittenberg spent $12,000.

Once Concordia installed the filter, it halved the amount of data coming onto its telecommunications network, Mr. Breitbarth said.

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