Music suits hit use of fast network
Dozens of Massachusetts college students will be hit with lawsuits from the recorded music industry today for allegedly illegally swapping thousands of songs over a superfast experimental network, called Internet2. At the same time, the motion picture industry will launch its own lawsuits today against students who have been sharing movies over the same network.
As with previous music industry suits, the Recording Industry Association of America does not know the names of those who did the file swapping, only their digital network addresses, which include four Massachusetts colleges: Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University and University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
The actions signal that Internet2, which is used on hundreds of college campuses but is little known outside research and academic circles, will become the latest battlefield in the war on Internet file swappers.
The RIAA plans to file suits today against 405 students nationwide. To get the names of the students, the association must file ''John Doe" lawsuits against anonymous defendants. Then it can subpoena the universities to reveal the students' names.
The movie and music companies have filed thousands of file-swapping suits against individuals. But these are the first suits to target users of Internet2, a system created in 1996 to develop a new generation of Internet technologies, indicating that the elite network is also being used to share copyrighted music and movies.
Operated by a consortium of more than 200 US universities, Internet2 can deliver up to 100 million bits of data per second to a connected desktop computer, compared to 1.5 million bits per second on a typical home broadband connection. The nonprofit consortium, which consists of the universities and companies such as Intel and Sun Microsystems, uses the network to develop and run advanced network technologies and applications.
The extra data bandwidth of Internet2 makes it ideal for a research university's heavy-duty scientific and technical research. But according to the RIAA, which generally files lawsuits on behalf of recording companies, many students are using i2hub, a program developed by a student at UMass-Amherst to scoop up large numbers of illicit music files. The combination of i2hub and the speed of Internet2 makes downloading large files much faster.
''We think that any policy maker or campus administrator would be outraged to learn that a special, high-speed Internet technology designed for academic research has been hijacked for illegal purposes," said Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, referring to Internet2.
Eleven of the suits will be filed against students at Harvard, 22 at MIT, 25 at BU, and 25 at the UMass-Amherst. On average, the file-swappers were offering to share 2,300 tunes on their computers. In total, the 405 students were offering to share about 930,000 files, the association said.
Officials at the universities said the schools do not police illicit activity on campus networks. Instead, students are warned about the dangers of illegal file-swapping. ''We have widely published acceptable use guidelines for how our networks should be used," said Jerrold Grochow, vice president for information services and technology at MIT. The officials also said that they will comply with the subpoenas and identify the students. ''The students have to be responsible for their actions." said Ed Blaguszewski, spokesman for UMass-Amherst.
Meanwhile, the Motion Picture Association of America said yesterday it would file suits against an unspecified number of students at UMass-Amherst and six other universities who have used Internet2 to swap movie files. ''We found treasure troves of people who are misusing the Internet for copyright theft," said Dean Garfield, the association's vice president and director of legal affairs.
It takes hours to download a movie on today's home broadband services, which discourages many Internet users to attempt to share such large files. But a computer connected to Internet2 could pull down a DVD-quality movie in just a few minutes. Garfield said that his group, through these suits, hopes to deter students from using Internet2 to steal movies.
UMass-Amherst student Wayne Chang, 21, is the founder of the i2hub Organization, which makes and distributes the i2hub file-swapping software. In an exchange of e-mails, Chang said he has no control over the files exchanged by i2hub users. ''i2hub does not host any files centrally," he said, ''nor does it have any indexes of files on the network." Chang compared i2hub to instant messaging software, which lets people exchange files but puts no limits on what they exchange. Chang said his company didn't create the software to help people make illegal file swaps. ''It was launched because there was a need to connect students together in different ways," he said. Chang took a leave from the university in December to concentrate on i2hub and other businesses.
Garfield of the motion picture association said his group purchased a membership in a special i2hub service that lets people access the system through an ordinary Internet connection. Chang said that such a service exists, but is supposed to be available only to students at colleges that are part of the Internet2 consortium.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.
