A panel of faculty and student members gathered Monday night, October 27 in the HUB Multi-purpose Room to discuss the downloading of music and other files. This sharing is illegal and grounds for fining and possible prosecution.
The faculty panel was comprised of the Dean of Students, Tim Keefe, Director of Informational Services, Dwight Fischer, Business Depart-ment representative, Lisa Lindgren, and Criminal Justice Department representative, Mark Fischler.
?The hope is that we can talk and raise awareness about what?s going on so that students can make informed good decisions? stated Keefe.
The Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been seek-ing those who have been acting as a server through the Internet. Al-though downloading music and files brings up a legal and moral issue, the RIAA isn?t necessarily looking for these offenders. They are looking for those who are down-loading files and then supplying it to the world.
When downloading a file, a user agreement pops up, acting as a marker for officials to mark people as servers. Through a series of sim-ple steps, the default agreement can be turned off, making it impossible to be caught as a server.
Five principles will exempt users from copyright infringement. Those exemptions are:
1. If the work you have used was unplanned and not pur-posely taken.
2. If your use does not harm the product in the marketplace.
3. If you are using a limited per-centage, i.e., a stanza from a poem, a chapter in a book.
4. If you are using the infor-mation for a factual report or argument.
5. If your use is non-profit or for educational matters.
Many students argued that by downloading a file and sharing it, an artist gains popularity and will eventually gain profit through fans at concerts and in the record stores. Not only will they be mak-ing a profit, students believed, but also the consumer will have the chance to sample the music before they purchase it minimizing the chance of discontent.
Colleges across the world are experiencing the dilemma of now having to deal with the RIAA and decreased bandwidth. Fischer commented that Plymouth State University experienced its own problem with Internet services when the network came to a crawl a couple of years ago. Because of a great number of students were downloading from Napster that the entire campus was affected as a result. Now Plymouth State, along with other schools, are dealing di-rectly with representatives from the RIAA. Several times a week Fischer is contacted with a list of IP addresses that are in violation of file