Not as much Napster going around

If you were planning on using Napster to grab some MP3's this afternoon, think again. Yale's Information and Technology Services announced on Thurs., Mar. 23 that access to the nationally-controversial music-trading network would be indefinitely blocked during the hours of 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, in an effort to deal with a level of traffic that has displaced more legitimate Internet use.

"This is the tip of the iceberg," Joe Paolillo, Director of Data Network Operations, said of the looming controversy over network bandwidth. This is the first time that Yale has had to block a specific service from its users, but it may not be the last.

The decision is not any kind of ruling on the legal status of Napster, something which is presently before the courts following a long-awaited suit by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

Since the inception of the MP3 format, the RIAA has been waging a vigorous battle to stop the vast flow of illegally-copied compressed music files between computers throughout the world. The Napster web site tells users not to violate copyright laws, but it also links to arguments claiming that MP3s do not undercut CD sales.

Although Carnegie Mellon University recently went through its internal network to stop MP3 use after complaints by the RIAA, H. Morrow Long, Information Security Officer, said that under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Yale is registered as an Internet Service Provider and not responsible for its users' actions. "It is important for students to realize that they have a legal liability," Long said.

Blocking access to Napster has been tested on-and-off since mid-Janurary, when ITS noticed jumps in the set of graphs that monitor its Internet traffic. Steadily growing usage was not as relevant in terms of downloaded files as for those computers that were serving out their MP3 collections through the Napster software, often to as many as 20 users at once.

When compared to times when blocking was tested, officials noticed a difference of up to 1.5 Megabits per second, which is 10 percent of Yale's recently-expanded 15 Megabit Internet connection. At peak times, this difference makes network use reach capacity, which means that users trying to get in or out of Yale via the Internet experienced slow or interrupted service during these times.

Long said he personally confronted some of the largest sources of Napster traffic at Yale. He said that many of them professed ignorance of the fact that Napster turns their computer into a server, laid wide open for other Napster users to feed upon. He said these students were amiable to decreasing use and that the computing assistants, who were consulted during the test of the blocking, had provided positive feedback about the peak-times restriction.

"From our perspective, it seems to solve the problem," Paolillo said. "We're marshalling, we're husbanding an important, dear resource, but the measures are not draconian."

Although the Napster program is based on reciprocation, constant usage by large numbers of Yale students has proven excessive. Paolillo also said he though a complete ban would be counterproductive, since students would invest effort in circumventing the block and undermine efforts to control use.

Since the monopolization of bandwidth to the commercial Internet, a costly resource that must be grown gradually, is the only real problem until the legal issues are settled, technical alternatives do present themselves.

C|net reported on Thu., Mar. 23 that Indiana University, which recently banned Napster, had worked with the company to create a version that avoids clogging the Internet connection by looking first within the university for files.

The revised software also attempts to reach Napster users at other universities, since they are connected by the large, unutilized bandwidth that constitutes Internet II. Yale has 45 Megabits to this network, which is less than twenty percent utilized. Nullsoft, the AOL-owned company that produces the popular Winamp MP3 player, is developing trading software that also purports to utilize such solutions. "Schools are all over on this," Paolillo said. "It's mutating weekly."

Furthermore, developing technologies allow ITS to set limits on how much each user can transmit instead of blocking whole sites, something that may be pursued in the future and that some cable companies are already utilizing. Long and Paolillo admit that present measures are just temporary, and that these issues will have to be dealt with as voice and video start to travel across the network.

"We realize this is a short term effort," Paolillo said. "It's not a philosophical issue per se."

On the other hand, as Yale enters its period of heaviest network utilization, it is possible that the little blue laws will have to be expanded, covering a broader span of peak hours. "At some point, I think we all need to look at what constitutes appropriate use," Paolillo said. "We're both frightened and thrilled."

—Kushal Dave