"Supreme Court ruling unlikely to affect student downloading, experts say"

Marijuana might be no closer to legalization, and the drinking age may be forever 21, but downloading music and movies -- another illegal, though more modern, college pastime -- is still in a heated debate over legality and responsibility.

This summer, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against illegal downloading in the case of MGM v. Grokster, a software company better known as the parent of Morpheus. According to legal experts, the decision won't stop file sharing, but it should have an impact.

"It's unlikely that college students will see file sharing opportunities really dry up in a significant way," said James Gibson, assistant law professor and director of the Intellectual Property Institute at the University of Richmond. "The genie is out of the bottle and it's really hard to stuff it back in."

It's hard to say what the tangible effects of the ruling will be, but file sharing will certainly continue "as a dull roar, if not as pervasive," said Gibson, who wrote two friend-of-the-courts briefs in the case.

At UB, the case holds weight due to the popularity of file sharing programs like DC++ and Soulseek. One moderator for a downloading hub at UB said he doesn't think students will be affected.

"(The ruling) allows the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) to go after the creators of the programs, not the users," said the junior student, who chose to remain anonymous. "Most of the programs like DC++ are being created and hosted outside the U.S. to begin with, so there's not much that they can do about the programs anyways."

In Grokster, the court ruled the software company could be held liable for copyright infringement on its networks because it wanted to promote that particular use of its products. Therefore the decision leaves all sorts of other file sharing entities free and clear, as long as they don't show that illegal intent, Gibson said.

"You can use a file sharing program for doing all sorts of perfectly legitimate things," he said.

In an attempt go legitimate on campus, about 50 about fifty colleges have started offering students free subscriptions to paid downloading services, including nearby University at Rochester, according to a recent article in The Utah Statesman.

While Rochester reported that about half of their students use Napster since it was made free in 2004, American University in Washington D.C. has seen even fewer students use the service.

The main complaint from students? Any songs downloaded through these services are copyright protected and can't be transferred to MP3 players, including popular iPods.

According to Gibson, the Grokster decision relates closely to a 1984 case in which Sony was not held responsible for illegal uses of its products. Another recent case, in Australia against KaZaA, has been much more similar to the 1999 Napster case that so many students are familiar with.

"That in some ways was much more like the first generation of file sharing cases," Gibson said. "It told KaZaA it had to implement some sort of filtering program. It has to figure out a way to keep the illegal materials to keep showing up in the search results."

Targeting the software companies is proving ineffective, Gibson said, but so has suing individuals, who are starting to fight back against the music and movie industries.

"The Supreme Court is cracking down on the software providers, simply because they have had very little luck going after the end user," said Will Taylor, a sophomore international studies major. "Still, I really don't think that this will change much for the dedicated software pirate. (File sharing) software still exists and college-age students still are low on cash. Therefore the computer science majors will always hack the anti-piracy protections and the rest of us with big hard drives will share it."

Steve Niezgoda, a senior political science major, said if UB offered a free subscription to Napster using the activity fee he would use it, but he would prefer the money go to better use.

"It's just a commodity that should not steal money from active and enriching clubs," Niezgoda said.

Stealing, Gibson said, is in fact what's at the heart of the issue, and that's what the music and movie industries need to realize if they ever want to stem piracy.

"It's really difficult to grasp the idea that taking something in an online environment is the equivalent of taking a CD from Tower Records," he said. "It's not really stealing in the classic way."

But then again, P2P software isn't really sharing either, he added.

"It's this sort of in between concept," Gibson said. "We don't really have a built in sense of whether it's right or wrong."

Email: spectrum-news@buffalo.edu