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The official explained that one way the RIAA identifies pirates is by using LimeWire, a popular peer-to-peer file-sharing program that is free online and used by many college students.Using public, online databases (such as those at arin.net or samspade.org), Media Sentry locates the name of the Internet-service provider and determines which traders are located at colleges or universities.In collecting evidence for those takedown notices, Media Sentry investigators do not usually download suspect music files. Instead, the company uses special software to check the “hash,” a sort of unique digital fingerprint, of each offered file to verify that it is identical to a copyrighted song file in the RIAA’s database. In the rare cases in which the hashes don’t match, the investigators download the song and use a software program sold by Audible Magic to compare the sound waves of the offered audio file against those of the song it may be infringing upon. If the Audible Magic software still doesn’t turn up a match, then a live person will listen to the song.If there is a match, Media Sentry investigators will then engage in a so-called TCP connection, or an electronic “handshake,” with the computer that is offering the file to verify that the computer is online and is ready to share the song.Based on that information, the RIAA will send a letter to the college asking for the song to be removed. The letter lists the name of the file and the date and time when Media Sentry investigators saw it available online.On listservs and in interviews, some university administrators have recently questioned the validity of some of these takedown notices because they say they do not have any record of a download at the named IP address at the specified time. RIAA officials said this is because investigators performed only a “handshake.”While the process for generating both takedown notices and settlement letters is largely automated, the RIAA said that before each warning is sent out, a full-time RIAA employee reviews each case to make sure the claim is legitimate and that the alleged pirate is in the United States. Thanks to the speed and ease of the automated process, though, the RIAA is “able to identify hundreds of instances of infringement on a daily basis,” according to RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth. She also acknowledged that the RIAA can tell only when a song is being offered for users to illegally download; investigators have no way of knowing when someone else is actually downloading the song.The organization does not perform similar automated investigations for file traders on commercial ISP’s (that is, Internet- service providers not operated by universities, such as Comcast). All notices received by commercial Internet-service providers are processed manually.“The automated takedown notice program we have right now is solely university-focused,” said the anonymous RIAA representative. “We’re trying to make universities aware that they have an issue with peer-to-peer file sharing on their network, and so we don’t send automated notices to commercial ISP’s, I think because they are generally aware that there’s a problem.”
As part of our investigation into the recent “spike” in DMCA notifications sent to campuses by the RIAA, EDUCAUSE has learned some details we believe will be of importance to many in the higher education community.In particular, we’ve learned that DMCA notices are frequently triggered by the presence in a “shared folder” of a file whose distribution from that shared folder would be unauthorized, rather than by observation of an actual unauthorized transmission of such a file. For simplicity, we’ll call these “folder-based” and “transmission-based” DMCA notices.We are told that the RIAA’s DMCA notices are almost completely folder-based, and have been so for many years. (The exception is BitTorrent, where actual transmissions do play a role in the process.) The RIAA says they believed campuses were aware of this but, based on conversations with IT staff from around the higher education community, we know that many campuses were not.EDUCAUSE and our members take copyright infringement seriously, with campus policies and practices going far beyond what the law requires and far beyond those of commercial ISP’s. Without a clear understanding of how DMCA notices are generated, campuses cannot implement their policies appropriately, and so we will continue to seek clarification on these details from the entertainment industry.We note in closing that the distinction between folder- and transmission-based infringement has no direct bearing on the recent “spike” in DMCA notifications. The RIAA affirms that the spike is due not to an increase in infringing activity on campus networks, but simply to changes in the mechanism used to detect and report the presence of files in shared folders. The number of DMCA notices received by any campus thus cannot be meaningfully correlated with the amount of actual infringement taking place on the campus network. For this reason, EDUCAUSE believes that counting DMCA notices is a completely inappropriate measure of success in combating infringement and an equally inappropriate basis for comparing the amount of infringement taking place campus-to-campus or year-to-year.
