With so many young, tech savvy students, University populations prove themselves as hot spots for pirated content.
But illegally downloading files has changed: content has diversified, methods have improved and copyright holders attempt to adapt to each illegal innovation.
As far as methodology goes, torrents are a popular device to download materials because of their efficiency.
Sheri Thompson, IT communications and planning officer for the University’s Information Technology Services, explained
torrents as a more evasive form of file downloading.
“They try to go unnoticed by dividing media into bits,” she said. “You download things piece by piece rather than as a whole to reduce chances of being caught.”
Torrents are used to evade copyright owners and agencies looking for those violating the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This act criminalizes the dissemination and reproduction of copyrighted works. This could range from downloading massive files of information to file sharing between two students’ computers.
And while there are a number of authorities who can catch this activity, it won’t be the University’s Information and Technology Services.
“ITS doesn’t monitor what you’re doing online,” Thompson said.
Instead, copyright holders and compa-
nies contact ITS after finding DMCA violations on campus. ITS then contacts these students. If ITS fails to do so, the University will be fined instead of the offending student.
Students caught in violation of the
DMCA are immediately fined $50 by the University and could face the dean of students after multiple offenses.
Michael Vincent was one of these students two years ago, but he’s since moved off campus — and off of the network. While he said he respects LSU’s rules, he still thinks “it’s a little ridiculous for them to be playing policeman for the copyright holders.”
“It’s not LSU’s fault that I was [torrenting], but in order to protect themselves, they have to make rules,” he said. “So I can
understand it.”
Like most college torrenters he knows, Vincent sticks to digital media for the
most part — music, TV shows and
movies. To Vincent, younger generations
like college students are more tech savvy and will understand how to use file sharing programs to receive information they want.
“Piracy is not really a cost issue, it’s more of a service issue,” he said. “I don’t want to pay for television I don’t watch. Like with cable packages, I don’t want 90 percent of those channels.”
Vincent sees Netflix as a great option to select a desired show without suffering
through commercials, but it still falls short on its offerings.
That being said, Vincent wouldn’t hes-
itate to cash in on one of torrenting’s latest trends — free textbooks.
“If I could not spend $150 on a textbook I would absolutely do that.”
But textbook pirating is in a seemingly infant stage. Vincent has never seen his textbooks available for pirating, nor has he known friends to find any, but he recalled the fledgling site librarypirate.ph.
The website has a limited, but varied selection of educational works ranging from biology to world and U.S. history.
“I can see the textbook thing becoming a bigger thing pretty soon,” Vincent said.
