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Last Wednesday, the Vassar Student Association (VSA) hosted a forum in Sanders Classroom’s Spitzer Auditorium to discuss the issue of illegal downloading on campus, a topic addressed in previous VSA Council meetings.
At this particular forum, three guest speakers were in attendance: Vice President for Computing and Information Services (CIS) Bret Ingerman, Dean of Students David “D.B.” Brown and Associate Professor for Networks and Systems David Susman.
The panel began with a conversation between the three speakers about whether or not the College should remove the “speed limit” for data transfer rates on individual computers on campus. “The cap on the speed of an individual is about 1.4 megabits per second,” explained Ingerman.
“I understand that this speed is generally slower than that of your computers at home.” The speed cap is designed to evenly distribute network speed and to deter students from using Vassar’s network resources to download large files.
Although CIS imposes this cap on the downloading speeds of the computers on campus, Vassar students download a substantial amount of material online each day. A majority of this information is downloaded through peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like BitTorrent or Limewire, use of which is illegal under copyright protection laws.
Peer-to-peer networks allow users to download shared files that are stored on the computers of other users, as opposed to from a central server. Ingerman pointed out that the College does not block peer-to-peer downloading, but “we know that a vast, vast majority of the downloading through peer-to-peer is illegal.”
There are, however, legal reasons to use peer-to-peer and other network resources of the College. As Ingerman mentioned in the forum, CIS assigns priority to the use of the network for academic reasons. However, the number of requests for higher speed made to CIS for academic use is almost zero.
“If we take off our speed limits, the risk of students getting caught for illegal downloading will significantly increase,” said Ingerman.
“The College has put a lot of effort into reducing such incidents,” said Ingerman. “By this time last year, 14 students had been caught for illegal downloading; this semester, we only have four.”
“The main problem we are faced with when dealing with illegal downloading,” remarked Ingerman, “is the notion that music should be free.” He said, for example, that often, students may consider shoplifting a book to be theft, but not downloading a song without permission. “There is nothing that can compete with the word ‘free,’” he said. “That is why this issue is hard to solve.”
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