Marquette Struggles With Illegal Student File Sharing

Illegal student “file sharing,” in which students either download copyrighted audio and video material or allow others to download such material from their own computers, has bedeviled Marquette, just as it has bedeviled pretty much every other college and university.

Indeed, it has created Internet access problems at Marquette in spite of what is now (by historical standards) a lot of bandwidth connecting the campus with the worldwide network.

Indeed, in one case a single student was found to be tying up 14% of the entire Internet bandwidth of the University.

So what is Marquette doing about this?

We interviewed both Kathy Lang, Director of Information Technology Services and Mike Wiedower, head network security guru at ITS, and here is the picture.

Marquette is dependent on complaints from the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America to initiate action.

Basically, those two organizations identify the network addresses (“IP addresses”) of users who have volunteered to let people download pirated files from their computers. When the address traces back to Marquette, they complain to ITS about the activity.

Assuming that Marquette can identify the connection of the computer offering illegal sharing (not always possible) all users at that connection (say, two roomates in a dorm room) are mailed “cease and desist” letters which they must sign, promising not to continue illegal file sharing. If they fail to respond within three days, they are disconnected from the Internet.

This is not exactly draconian, and indeed is probably about the least Marquette can do to avoid getting itself sued by the RIAA or MPAA. Nothing, of course, stops the RIAA or MPAA from suing the individual students.

Students can get into worse trouble, and in a handful of cases have gotten dragged before the Student Conduct Review Board.

To meet this fate a student has to be really brazen.

Marquette, like virtually all colleges and universities has an Acceptable Use Policy. Some students have run afoul of this by using certain tricks to defeat University attempts to “shape” use of bandwidth.

Such “shaping” involves ITS routers identifying certain kinds of traffic (downloading of audio and video files, for example) and giving it less bandwidth than other uses (say, accessing research resources from the library).

Such shaping, of course, can be evaded with the right sort of software. But only at the risk of being found out by ITS and getting in real hot water.

The good news is that, compared to other universities, Marquette seems to get little attention from the RIAA and the MPAA. While the University of Wisconsin-Madison is near the top of the list of schools where students pirate copyrighted materials, Marquette is far down in the pack.

Campus Internet Connection Overloaded: Student File Sharing at Fault

Anybody who has tried to access the Internet on campus, especially during the afternoon, has noticed that web pages load slowly, and sometimes time out and fail to load at all.

Happily, attempts from outside Marquette to access web sites located on campus are not affected.

The situation is bad enough that the Marquette Tribune recently posted a story about it, and (correctly) reported that student peer-to-peer “file sharing” (read: illegal music piracy) is to blame.

We talked to Information Technology Services network guru Chad Gorectke about the problem.

The University has what, by historic standards, is a lot of bandwidth connecting it to the Internet.

There is one 45 Mb (megabit) per second link to WiscNet, one 70 Mb. connection to Time-Warner Telecom, and an additional 50 Mb. connection to Time-Warner Telecom.

But even that bandwidth can’t keep up with the voracious appetite of students who download music and (increasingly) videos.

These connections are used to full capacity from (typically) 11:00 a.m. until 1:00 a.m, leaving only the wee hours of the morning with any excess bandwidth. Of course, if the demands for connections merely equal, or only slightly exceed, the available bandwidth web pages may load fairly quickly. But during the afternoon, the amount of traffic has often caused web pages to time out and entirely fail to load.

The straightforward way to attack this sort of problem is to buy more bandwidth, much as you might junk a dialup connection from your home and go to DSL.

The problem is that bandwidth is expensive, and student demands for bandwidth are pretty much insatiable. Previous increases in bandwidth have quickly been overwhelmed by increased use.

ITS has long tried to limit peer-to-peer traffic. A few years ago, the strategy was to block Internet ports that Napster (the then-current way of pirating music) used. But technology rushes forward.

Gorectke declined to talk on the record about the current attempts to block this sort of traffic and the ways students get around it, not wanting to give out information that might help people abuse University resources.

But we can say that, while the University has more capability to block certain kinds of traffic now, the technology for evading any blocking attempt has progressed even faster.

The problem is hardly unique to Marquette. Indeed, it’s absolutely typical at universities all over the country.

Segregating Student Traffic

The strategy likely to be used is to segregate what Gorectke calls “real traffic” (faculty and staff internet access, workstations at libraries, etc.) from student traffic. Aggregate student bandwidth could then be limited, leaving a clear internet path for other users.

Might this result in students being unable to do research in their dorm rooms because of a lack of connectivity? Certainly. Might students have to go to the library to get any real work done? Quite likely. Will this increase the incentive to leave Marquette dorms and take off-campus apartments? Quite possibly.

But lacking the infrastructure to give each and every student limited and controlled bandwidth, there is really little choice.

This whole situation is a classic example of “The Tragedy of the Commons” in which, when some resource is shared by everybody and used at will, it will be overused and eventually destroyed.

The solution will be to install an infrastructure that can limit the bandwidth available to each individual student. For the moment, however, things are going to get worse (at least for students) before they get better.