CUA- Counsel Online

Washington Post Interview with Craig Parker and Readers of Washington Post Online

Music Piracy on Campus
Craig Parker
General Counsel, Catholic University
Thursday, August 28, 2003; 2:00 p.m. ET

Music piracy. That's what the recording industry and its watchdog agency, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), are going after. In April the association filed lawsuits that cost four students at colleges in New York, New Jersey and Michigan between $12,000 and $17,500 each in settlements. Last month the RIAA filed more than 800 subpoenas to individual users.

"We do a disservice to our students if they leave here without having learned the basics of intellectual property law," said Catholic University general counsel Craig Parker in an interview with The Washington Post.

washingtonpost.com: Craig Parker, thanks for being with us today. The issue of downloading music is being taken very seriously by the record business and the RIAA. Many college students are being hit with lawsuits, subpoenas. As general counsel for Catholic University, how do you deal with file-sharing music off the Internet?

Craig Parker: I'm happy to be here to be able to discuss, at least as far as Catholic University's experience and my knowledge permit, these issues related to student sharing of MP3 sound and movie files. I should note that I don't have much technical background with regard to computers, so I may have to come back and beg for a translation from technical jargon to something a lawyer can understand!

Catholic's approach to this issue really has two prongs. First, we work at having a system in our administration that will assure we're in compliance with the law as it regards our responses to file-sharing complaints we receive from the recording industry. Our process for response is posted on our web page at http://counsel.cua.edu/copyright/index.cfm. Second, we try to be proactive in educating students about what the law provides, both as to limits on use of MP3 files but also on the concept of "fair use."

Fairfax, Va.: The software industry targeted college campuses for a crackdown on piracy of its products a few years ago. Is software copying still a problem among students?

Craig Parker: I think it's hard for university administrators like myself to tell whether our students are copying software. I can tell you that we've tried to educate our students and faculty about this issue; we try to be very careful to make sure that anything our employees are using is properly licensed; and that we have not received any complaints about illegal copying of software by any of our students.

Athens, Ohio: I'm wondering what steps institutions like yours take to stop music piracy. Do you monitor student networks?

Craig Parker: As I noted elsewhere in this discussion, we have a process to deal with complaints that we receive, all of which have come in pursuant to the process set forth under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). We also try to do proactive education with our students. Our student computers (typically, a student's own computer in his/her dorm room) access the Internet through the university network. We are not required legally to monitor our networks to determine whether they are transferring music files and we do not do so. We have set up our computers in our student computer "user areas" so that they dump everything on their hard drives every night, so that students cannot use those computers to stash away MP3's.

washingtonpost.com: Isn't this a difficult thing to monitor? Thousands of students are downloading music all the time. How do the authorities manage such a situation and pinpoint individuals for prosecution?

Craig Parker: It would be a very difficult thing to monitor on any campus, it would probably absorb all the staff resources we have dedicated to network support. Congress and the courts have not yet seen fit to require universities or other internet service providers to do this, so I would say at this point that it's an obligation that we have not seen necessary to accept. Since some peer-to-peer file sharing can be legal, in a number of different situations, it would be quite burdensome to try to figure out who was doing file sharing legally or illegally.

Craig Parker: It has not come to our attention that any of our students are running file-sharing services. We have tried to provide information to our students (and to the faculty who have the opportunity to discuss these issues with our students from time to time) about the hefty penalties that are associated with violations of federal law in this regard. We have advised students of their potential exposure to being sued by the industry, as has become clearly the strategy the industry has adopted over the past few months. The industry has said they are going after people doing "substantial" amounts of illegal sharing, so anyone running a file-sharing service is opening themselves up to a suit.

Arlington, Va.: Does this problem also exist with movies and video clips on the Internet?

Craig Parker: Ah, a technical question, which makes me worry about my terminology. We have received occasional complaints (as have all schools, I venture to say) from the Recording Industry Association of America about student movie files, so they seem to be as easy to share as sound files. The bulk of offending items the industry has found on our student computers have been sound files, however.

Washington, D.C.: At Catholic University, if a student is actually subpoenaed by the RIAA, what does that do to his status as a student?

Craig Parker: Well, I warned you I wasn't a techie. My page disappeared for a minute, so several more questions have now popped up. If a student is subpoenaed, for any matter, in the first instance it is the student's personal matter. I'm not even sure how we would know about such a subpoena. If it was determined that a student violated the law with regard to MP3s, then that student would probably be processed into our student judicial system. I suppose the analogy would be, what if we learned that a student was the subject of a civil suit from a print publisher who accused the student of copyright violation? We'd have to have a nexus, a connection to the student's status as a student here. Probably at worst, we'd end up cutting off the student's internet access through our system -- that's the penalty under the DMCA -- if we determined that he/she was a repeat or intentional offender. We might also take some student judicial action against him, such as probation.

Craig Parker: Yes, if we receive a complaint from the industry that a student has illegal files, we are this semester implementing a system where the student has to pull the offending material from his/her computer; advise us they have done so; and complete a short tutorial aimed at making sure they now understand some basic points about copyright law, including MP3 files. We have not ever received two complaints (which would make a student a "repeat offender") about a student.

Fairfax, Va.: One person was quoted in the Post story today as saying that colleges promote how fast their Internet service is and that immediately that means how fast it will be to download something to the potential student. It's just what they want. Can you comment?

Craig Parker: This is probably a bit out of my jurisdiction, but two thoughts. First, I don't think schools overly promote their internet speed, and I've never heard anyone in higher ed suggest that they want that speed so students can do illegal sharing. I don't do illegal sharing personally, yet I'm always bugging our computer staff as well as my home internet service provider for more speed. I think most people want more speed just because it makes the net easier to use.

Rockville, Md.: You say "We do a disservice to our students if they leave here without having learned the basics of intellectual property law"

I say it's more than an intellectual property law debate -- it's about the overall concept that just because one has the opportunity to steal something it's okay to do so.

No different than running out of a restaurant without paying for your meal, or shoplifting.

Craig Parker: I agree that there is an issue of right or wrong. Sometimes this is the risk of agreeing to be interviewed for a newspaper article, because they don't print everything you say! Underneath my "disservice" comment is the notion that we are trying to teach our students right and wrong, and legal compliance, and copyright compliance, is part of that. One of the copyright publications we provide to our students essentially has the same line you use: just because you are able to something technically on the computer doesn't mean it's right or legal.

Washington, D.C.: Hello. What did you think of Rebecca Dana's amazing piece on the front page of the Washington Post this morning?

Craig Parker: Well, in my other life before I went to law school, I was a general assignment reporter for several newspapers, and I was never assigned a topic as interesting as this! This is a big issue, because for better or worse Congress has structured property ownership rights a certain way and the courts are enforcing it. At the same time, you have this tremendous wide-open technology and a whole generation of students has been and is coming to our campuses with a culture that says, "Anything on the internet is freely usable." Especially after having experienced Napster. We see elements of the same philosophy in trying to educate our students about what constitutes "plagiarism." Many of them have learned many different approaches in high school as to what can be used from the web in a paper or project, and what is required of the writer in terms of attribution. Catholic University is working hard at making sure our students get a good traditional grounding so that they'll know what constitutes plagiarism, and what doesn't. We're not doing them any favors sending them out of here to be teachers, social workers, architects, etc. without teaching them what the rules are about intellectual property ownership. I have no problem with a student disagreeing with what the law is on ownership and use of MP3 files, but I think we have to teach them what the law is, how to change it if they want, and the consequences for violating the law as it exists now.

Somewhere, USA: This all seems like a real uphill battle that's really going to be hard to win. Is the point of the policing that if enough people are fined and it starts costing people money then it will deter future illegal downloaders?

Craig Parker: I couldn't agree more with your first sentence. But the recording industry apparently has decided that as a strategic matter, they have no choice but to try case-by-case enforcement. I have to say that bringing only a few high-profile cases seems to have caught the attention of our students. I did a training session for some of our student employees who work in residence halls last week, and talked a bit about this issue. They had many, many questions; clearly they are aware of the enforcement effort; they wanted to know whether they had legal exposure if they had a certain number of files on line, etc. I assume the industry's strategy is exactly what you state: that if people think they're going to be prosecuted for having illegal files, it will slow down the illegal downloading. That's the same theory that IRS prosecution of tax violations works on, I think: they go after only a tiny portion of the taxpayers, but a lot of people are careful about tax cheating because they don't want to end up on the wrong end of an IRS audit.

Craig Parker: Not completely unless you have a couple of hours! It's a term that refers to ownership rights in publications, marks such as trademarks, patents -- anything where the legal system has created ownership rights to "property" that's not the typical tangible property we think of, but rather what is the product of someone's intellectual efforts, like writing a book, a song, making a movie, painting a picture, etc.

Craig Parker: Thanks to everyone who participated for the excellent questions. I'll share your thoughts and provocative questions with our administrators at the university as we continue to address this issue. If anyone has other questions that they'd like to pursue with me, you can email me at parker@cua.edu.