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Lost Under the Streetlight

10/29/2004

By Kenneth C. Green

Fact Four—Moreover, let us agree that circa 2000 (The “Napster I” era), college students in on-campus housing represented perhaps the largest identifiable population of individuals who had generally unrestricted 24/7 access to broadband, i.e., high-speed Internet services.
Fact Five—Finally, let us also agree that not all 16 million full- and part-time college students enrolled in more than 4,000 two- and four-year public, private, and for-profit degree-granting American colleges and universities have 24/7 access to campus broadband services. The actual number of college students who enjoy 24/7 broadband access probably amounts to some 2.5 million students, primarily those full-time undergraduates who are fortunate enough to live in on-campus housing and dorms.

Connecting the Dots

Let’s now describe the dots that seem to define the media industry’s persistent complaint about “song- swapping among college students.”

First—College students are a subgroup of the larger “youth population,” ages 12 to 30, that is the nation’s primary consumer of music, movies, and media.
Second—College students in wired campus dorms were among the first to experience unrestricted access to broadband.
Third—The late 1990s arrival of Napster as an unrestricted P2P file-sharing utility enabled individuals with access to high-speed networks (including but not limited to college students) to download digital content, including music and movies often in violation of copyright.

Connecting the dots led the RIAA and others in the media industries to portray college students as digital pirates: thoughtless, vile villains who steal music and movies with little regard for copyright, intellectual property, the creative efforts of artists, actors, and musicians, and the enabling financial investments of music distributors and movie studios.

Additionally, beyond targeting college students, the RIAA and others in the media industries have also attempted to hold colleges and universities—as the Internet service providers (ISPs) for college students—implicitly culpable for the admittedly inappropriate downloading of music and media on campus networks.

That Was Then

Today, various IT industry sources estimate that more than 23 million American households enjoy high-speed Internet access. This means that college students are just another subgroup within the larger and fast-growing population of consumers who have broadband services provided by Adelphia, Verizon, Comcast, Cox, Earthlink, SBC and Time Warner, among others.

Moreover, colleges and universities are far more aggressive and vigilant about content and copyright issues than are the consumer ISPs. For example, data from the Campus Computing Survey (www.campuscomputing.net) reveal that four-fifths of US universities and two-thirds of four-year colleges have (and enforce) policies that address digital content on campus networks. As noted in the Joint Committee report, many institutions have made changes in their acceptable use policies; some now require incoming students to complete an online tutorial that includes information about copyright issues before issuing e-mail accounts.



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