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ITS policy sees success

The University’s newest effort to curb illegal file sharing seems to be working, and has even attracted the attention of NBC Universal.

Of about 8,700 students living in residence halls, only 39 agreed in the fall to use certain peer-to-peer file sharing software legally when prompted by the network to either delete these programs or accept the “hall pass” policy, said Chris Williams, manager of ResNET.

Copyright infringement has been estimated to cost UNC $40,000 a year in legal fees and employee time, prompting UNC to implement hall pass at the start of the fall semester.

If a student does not accept hall pass, he or she must remove peer-to-peer sharing software in order to access the campus network.

If a student violates the hall pass policy, he or she is given a disciplinary referral on the first offense. Previously, a referral occurred on the second offense, while the first only merited an educational session and a meeting with an administrator.

After hall pass was featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education, two companies approached UNC about the policy in November — NBC Universal and MovieLabs, a group of six major motion picture studios.

Larry Conrad, vice chancellor for Information Technology Services, said the groups noticed a decrease in illegal file sharing at UNC and set up a meeting with ITS officials.

“They wanted to find out what we were doing and how it was working,” he said.

“They were very impressed with the program and they wanted to basically package and publicize it as the best practice for higher education across the country.”

Conrad said one of the merits of hall pass is that it gives students the opportunity to make an informed choice. “It basically gets us out of having to do a lot of hand holding and lecturing and being the IT police,” he said.

Hall pass creates no additional costs because it was built on top of pre-existing software, said Ryan Turner, network specialist for ITS who helped develop the policy.

Conrad said universities are usually targeted by copyright holders because they provide a large volume of bandwidth and have a large concentration of illegal file sharing.

Jim Gogan, director of networking systems for ITS, said meeting with these national groups might mean that the University will become less of a target.

Companies might not bother to act, he said, if they see only one or two violations at UNC “because they know as an institution we’re serious about our efforts.”

Robert Barker, judicial programs coordinator in the Dean of Students Office, said hall pass seems to have decreased copyright infringement cases, but he couldn’t be sure because violations in his office aren’t specifically marked as violating hall pass.

Since August, Barker said he has handled six cases of copyright infringement, as opposed to 12 between March and August.

Students who have peer-to-peer file sharing programs on their computers will be prompted to accept the hall pass policy at the start of each semester, Williams said.

Contact the University Editor at university@dailytarheel.com.

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