An amendment to the Higher Education Act, which was recently passed by the House of Representatives, aims to reduce illegal file-sharing on college networks.
Universities are now required to make their policies on illegal downloading publicly available, develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal file-sharing and explore technology that would prevent illegal downloading.
Penn already meets some of the amendment's requirements, but others "impose unreasonable costs" that the University "can't support," said Bill Andresen, head of Penn's office in Washington.
One provision Andresen said Penn would have difficulty implementing requires universities to initiate Internet-filtering programs that prevent any kind of illegal downloading, rather than programs like Ruckus that simply offer a venue for legal downloads.
"The reality is that most of the filtering systems that are out there right now either slow the network down unacceptably or don't work," Andresen said.
But on other fronts, Penn is already in compliance. The University provides a program during New Student Orientation that explains legal ways to share files, meeting the amendment's first requirement.
Penn also subscribes to Ruckus - a company that licenses music, movies and games from their respective labels, which students can then download legally for free.
More than 9,000 Penn students have registered with Ruckus, said Chris Lawson, Ruckus' director of corporate development.
Penn is urging the House to adopt the Senate version of the amendment, which was passed last spring and only mandates that universities educate students about legal file-sharing, Andresen said.
Yet college students may not be the biggest downloading perpetrators.
The Motion Picture Association of America reported last month that there was a data-entry error in its 2005 study of illegal file-sharing and that college students account for just 15 to 16 percent of revenue losses due to illegal downloading, not the previously reported 44 percent.
The new figure includes all college students, not just the 18.7 percent use campus networks.
The real figure of MPAA revenue loss due to illegal downloading on campus networks is closer to 3 percent, Mark Luker, vice-president of EduCause, a lobby group that represents college network managers, said in a statement.
Andresen agreed that the music and entertainment industries are "making these illegal college downloads out to be a much bigger problem than they really are."
A joint committee is considering the versions of the Higher Education Act passed by the Senate and House. It's possible that the revised version of the act that comes before the chambers for final passage will not include all of the Houses' provisions regarding illegal downloading.
"We will have to see the final version to see how it affects Penn," Andresen said.
