U.S.

Colleges Split On Napster Access

October 2, 2000 / 11:53 AM EDT / AP

As Napster's battle for survival resumes in California federal court, colleges and universities nationwide are issuing verdicts of their own on whether to block students' access to the Internet music-swapping service.

On many campuses, Napster has won.

"We are an educational institution and we will err on the side of unfettered access to information," said Bob Harty, a spokesman for the Georgia Institute of Technology, which last week denied a lawyer's request on behalf of two music acts to block access to Napster.

"Once you start down that road ... well, we could tie up an awful lot of staff people and resources trying to evaluate Web sites' content, and we don't want to get into that," he said.

Other schools - among them Michigan, Stanford, Princeton and Duke - responded in like manner to the Sept. 7 letter from Howard King, a Los Angeles lawyer who represents Metallica and Dr. Dre.

"I think the overwhelming majority of universities are reacting the same way we have. Most are not blocking Napster," said Mike Smith, assistant chancellor for legal affairs at the University of California in Berkeley.

Metallica, Dre and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have sued Napster, claiming its software allows people to steal music by infringing on copyrights. Three universities - Yale, Indiana and Southern California - also were sued but later dropped as defendants after they agreed to block out the site.

In July, California federal judge Marilyn Hall Patel ruled that Napster encouraged widespread copyright infringement, granting a preliminary injunction against Napster.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stayed her order hours before it was to take effect. On Monday, that court is to hear arguments on whether to continue the stay pending a trial - thus allowing Napster to live on.

Napster contends that the millions of Americans who use its service - the San Mateo, Calif. company says 28 million people have downloaded the software - are not violating any law. The company bases its defense on the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, which it claims contains immunity provisions when music is shared for noncommercial use.

Into this fray comes higher education, whose students have been among Napster's most ardent patrons and defenders.

Georgia Tech students say they're pleased with their school's decision.

"Why should Georgia Tech be a filter?" asked Darren, an aerospace engineering major from New York City who declined to reveal his surname because he said he's read that lawyers have filed copyright infringement complaints against students quoted in Napster stories.

Two of the nation's largest universities - Texas and Ohio State - both block Napster access, but only because they are concerned about their campuswide networks getting clogged with swapped music.

Officials at Texas, which developed a bandwidth-usage poliy over the summer for computers used in its dorms, struggled to avoid limits on Internet access, said Tom Edgar, associate vice president for academic computing at Texas.

"Twenty percent of the total university bandwidth was going toward something that we were pretty sure was Napster use," he said. Edgar acknowledges, of course, that numerous Napster-like services exists that can supply the same files. So filtering out Napster won't stop online music-swapping.

At some universities, officials are taking enforcement one step further.

Oklahoma State campus police confiscated a students computer last month over allegations by the RIAA that it was used to distribute copyright material.

And Penn State officials are questioning students and faculty whose computers show heavy file-transfer traffic. In recent weeks, the school warned computer users not to download from Napster.

Other schools have decided to block Napster on the grounds that it is a tool to break the law. Among them is Northeastern University in Boston, where former student Shawn Fanning wrote Napster's technical underpinnings in his dorm room two years ago.

Jerry Neuner, president of the American Association of University Administrators, says Napster has forced administrators to review intellectual property policies and decide what, if anything, should be blocked from campus networks.

"We are talking about a very subtle moral debate here in which reasonable people can disagree," said Neuner, associate vice president for academic affairs at Canisius College.

The private liberal arts college in Buffalo, N.Y., has blocked Napster on ethical grounds.

"It's not free for you to steal books from the public library, and it's not free to download music you haven't paid for," Neuner said.

Results of a survey released Thursday ran counter to that argument.

It found that 78 percent of those who download music said they don't consider it stealing, and 61 percent said they don't care if that music is copyright-protected. The query of 2,109 adults by the Pew Internet and American Life Project also found that those under 30, those with college degrees and people with household incomes above $75,000 were least likely to consider downloading music a crime.

Harty, the Georgia Tech spokesman, said a committee studying Napster struggled with the question of whether defending access to the site was worth the potential legal bills.

"It would have been much easier to say we're going to fight to the death over continued unfettered access to the works of William Shakespeare or something like that," he said. "Ultimately, it was something that we thought was worthwhile standing pat on."