The editorial below is reprinted with the permission of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, where it appeared Feb. 16, 2004.

Steering Surfers Away From Illegal Digital Downloading

By Charles E. Phelps

If you haven't downloaded music or video from the Web, you're not living in the twenty-first century. At least, that's what some college students would tell you.

For them, the World Wide Web is as much a source of entertainment as television and radio were to preceding generations. (Indeed, one recent study noted that teens and young adults now spend more time online -- excluding time spent on e-mail -- than watching television or listening to the radio.) The Web is a ubiquitous element of life for students, providing a ready source of music for those who know how to download it.

Trouble is, much of that downloading is illegal. In the past few years, a number of file-sharing programs -- known as peer-to-peer, or P2P -- have sprung up to allow Web surfers to trade music and video without appropriate permission. It's free, but it's not legal. Those who copy or distribute copyrighted files through these schemes violate federal law and face serious consequences if caught.

The Joint Committee on Peer-to-Peer File Sharing is a national effort started about a year go by the higher education community and recording and movie industries to devise the best solutions as they might pertain to college students. I chair the Joint Committee's Task Force on Technology, and I am hopeful that all sides of this issue will find the common ground necessary for reasonable solutions.

One reason we are eager to work with the recording industries relates to a core mission of any university: to create intellectual property, in the form of new inventions and new ideas. For obvious reasons, we promote respect for the ownership of what's created or invented on our campuses (and observance of appropriate "fair use" principles for those materials as needed for educational purposes). Therefore, we must respect the ownership of artists' "creative property" as well.

There are legal alternatives for Internet downloading. The University has just announced an arrangement providing students living in River Campus and Eastman School of Music residence halls with free access to Napster's music library of more than 500,000 songs. When the program begins later this semester, students will be able to listen to songs on their computers or purchase them for 99 cents each to transfer to a portable music player or burn to a CD.

As the first private university in the country -- and only second to Penn State -- to announce such an arrangement, we're effectively engaging in a national experiment. It's hard now to predict what model will establish itself in the long term for college campuses -- it may be the Napster model, or, ultimately, something entirely different -- but that's precisely why it's important to run this "experiment" and see what happens. While many of us in academe clearly see it as the recording industries' responsibility to pursue copyright violators, we can help educate our students on the issue and promote legal alternatives.

Before the dust settles, though, debate will continue on the rights and wrongs of digital sharing. I invite the Greater Rochester community to a discussion titled "What Part of 'Jailhouse Rock' Don't You Understand? Defining Rights in the Digital Age" at 8 p.m. tonight [Feb. 16, 2004] in Hoyt Hall on the University's River Campus. Cary Sherman, President of the Recording Industry Association of America -- and one of the key participants in this national discussion -- will join Marjorie Hodges Shaw, co-founder and former director of Cornell University's Computer Policy and Law Program, several students, and me in a panel discussion moderated by President Thomas H. Jackson.

Clearly, all of us -- artists, recording companies, and consumers -- need to come to grips with the ability of Web surfers to grab, copy, and share digital files with an ease that might have seemed wildly futuristic just a few decades ago. Stay tuned as the debate continues and solutions emerge.