Music Sharing to Be Blocked

By Kyle Lawson

While many students believe that sharing music files over the internet is not a big deal, Information Technology (IT), has decided to crack down on file sharing. By the end of September, programs will be in place that will stop all person-to-person (P2P) file sharing on campus. Due to an increase of cases sent by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the college believes they must take action. Within the first three weeks of the semester, the number of cases brought against students equaled those sent last year.

Students have received settlement letters ranging from 205,000 dollars to as high as 433,000 dollars. Though the RIAA has settled out of court for anywhere between five to ten thousand dollars. Rod Tosten, Vice President of Information Technology, says that IT has talked not only with the college lawyers and College, but also with other schools, and it was decided to block the methods and protocols used in illegal file sharing. The program that will be used parallels that used to filter out spam, which are 98% efficient.

In addition to students receiving settlement letters, other problems are attributed to the illegal file sharing. These include an impacted bandwidth, and affects to the throughput of the network. Depending on the time of day anywhere between 30-60% of inbound traffic and 40-70% of outbound traffic was file sharing. One student had as many as 16,000 connections going through the college network to their computer. Slow response from the network is attributed to the large volume of file sharing. The most common P2P protocols used are BitTorrent and Gnutella. It should be noted that http protocols such as iTunes will not be blocked.

Another issue is the amount of time spent on the cases. Rod Tosten estimates that last year Information Technology alone lost one to two person months handling all the cases. Along with time, money and other resources are lost when IT has to deal with a student file sharing case.

However, due to the college’s inability to recognize copyrighted material, the programs being blocked will include legal ones, too. In an effort to make sure the programs will not affect the academic programs, IT has been talking with professors trying to determine if they will be using protocols and programs that will be blocked. Sunderman Conservatory, Film Studies, and Mussleman Library have already been contacted.

Student reaction at the September 10th Student Senate meeting when the announcement was made was unwelcoming, with many students concerned about legal file sharing being blocked. Brian Broderick, a Gettysburg Student Technology Center Student Employee, commented that Gettysburg has some of the most conservative network policy in the country,

“The block on the P2P protocol means that Gettysburg College is one of the few, if not the only, higher education institutes in the United States to take this radical step. No doubt, this is due to the reputation of P2P as being used for illegal file transfers. It’s going to block a lot of legitimate applications, and sever the development of this protocol as a learning resource on campus completely. It will also have a direct impact on some VOIP (voice over internet program) applications