Recent RIAA lawsuits charging university students here and nationwide with music piracy have OIT officials facing Congressional pressure and considering a campus crackdown on illegal downloading.
At a University Senate Student Affairs Committee meeting Friday, Office of Information Technology Vice President and Chief Information Officer Jeff Huskamp proposed purchasing hardware to block off-campus downloading sites Limewire and Aries from the university's system.
The resolution comes as the university is moving up the RIAA's national ranking of music pirating campuses, rising up to 15 this year from 28. Huskamp said the notoriety has become particularly alarming after Congress this summer considered requiring all top-20 universities to take steps to eliminate downloading.
"Going to No. 15 on the list I think has raised our visibility, and I think in a very negative way," Huskamp said.
University senators generally supported Huskamp's bid, but balked at another proposal to seize and shutdown the student-revered intranet file-sharing hub on the campus, Direct Connect, better known to most students as DC++.
They voted seven to five against disabling the hub, generally because many university senators said they opposed how the strategy would require the university single out one student - the hub administrator - while the other measure focused more broadly on the university network.
"I kind of feel like … the steps to go after our own students with DC++ aren't warranted yet," said a student on the committee. "I think it's good to look into after we get rid of the others."
Several universities have already eliminated all file-sharing services on school grounds, including Ohio University and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, which was previously ranked first on the RIAA's list.
The university has shut down DC++ several times in the past, but never without a student complaint, as Huskamp proposed. And although the service has repeatedly re-spawned, he said he was confident the university could stamp it out with a more aggressive approach.
"I think eventually it'll be so much hassle, there won't be a hub operator at some point in the future," Huskamp said.
Although the senate committee's vote served as nothing more than a recommendation for OIT, it split its top leadership. Roberto Munster, the committee chair, did not participate in the vote.
"I needed more information to take that vote," he said. "I don't know what effect shutting down Limewire and Aries would have on DC++."
The two services account for 87 percent of the illegal file sharing notices the university receives from the RIAA, Huskamp said. The RIAA cannot hand down citations for DC++ because they do not have access to the university's intranet.
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