The MP3 war hits Yale University

MP3: three little initials that send shivers down the spines of record company executives and bring visions of a music revolution to audiophiles everywhere. Since hitting the internet, MP3s, a file format that allows high-quality digital music to be sent in smaller packages, have made it much easier for people—illegally at times—to distribute new, old, and sometimes copyrighted music over the Internet. College students, with access to high-speed networks, have been some of the most active traders of MP3 and other audio files.

One startup company, Napster, has again fueled the flames of the MP3 debate with their new software, also called Napster, which allows users to access the personal MP3 collections of other users all over the world. Though the company posts a disclaimer claiming that users are responsible for copyright violations, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), has sued Napster for infringing those same copyright laws. At Oregon State University, the administration decided to completely block access to both Napster's program and its website, alleging that Napster use was taking up almost 5% of the school's internet resources. Here at Yale, Information Technology Services (ITS) conducted tests during the week of Jan. 25, during which access to Napster's website was shut down for hours at a time in order to gauge the effect that Napster usage has on the University's resources.

Though Yale does not presently have a set policy on MP3 usage or Napster, a meeting with the computing assistants (CAs) has been planned for Fri., Feb. 3, to discuss ways of discouraging Napster use.

For ITS, it is bandwidth, rather than copyright, that remains a main concern in relation to Napster. "The ITS Appropriate Use Policy has two sections directly relevant to MP3 traffic," Daniel Updegrove, director of ITS, said. The first of these is "denial of service," which includes resource hogging, and the other is "copyright," which states that students must observe "intellectual property rights," when distributing information. "MP3 traffic is not inherently a violation of law or University policy," said Updegrove. "It's a violation of law when copyright is infringed, and it's a violation of University policy either when copyright law is broken and/or when some component of the University network, the user's subnet, the campus backbone, or a gateway to the Internet or Internet 2, is carrying excessive traffic to/from one user."

According to Updegrove and H. Morrow Long, the information security officer for ITS, Yale has no present plans to block access to Napster or any plans to crack down on the sharing of MP3's. However, concerns about Napster-related use putting a strain on Yale's Internet connection led ITS to conduct the ongoing tests. "In order to determine the aggregate impact of Napster traffic on the network and Internet gateways, we have shut down access to www.napster.com several times," Updegrove said.

These tests, along with monitoring of Napster use, has shown that Napster users account for "5 to 33 percent of network traffic, depending on time of day," Long said. Since this usage did not come from a single individual user, but rather many users, ITS did not act. But Updegrove warned that if any computers were found to be attracting an inordinately high percentage of network traffic, their owners or administrators would be informed that they were in violation of University policy on resource-hogging.

In developing a policy towards Napster, ITS is also intent on "informing" students rather than blocking access. According to Long, ITS plans to meet with CAs in order to decide the policy towards Napster "at the end of Friday," and Long and ITS have plans to communicate their views on Napster through the CAs. "We're going to do it through the CAs and let the students know that they shouldn't use excessive resources or violate copyright laws." Long hopes that, through CAs, students will be discouraged from using Napster to an extreme.

An anonymous Yale student and Napster user, however, stated that "if ITS comes around and tells people not to use Napster because it's taking five or ten percent of Yale's bandwidth, I don't think it will stop anyone. I don't think that my use of Napster places that much of a strain on the network," he added.

— Ayon Nandi