I have heard a couple of professors say that some students are so ingenious when it comes to cheating on tests that the profs feel they should give the students credit for their resourcefulness, even while they fail them on the tests. University administrators, however, are taking a harder stance when it comes to another common form of cheating on campuses: music piracy.

Higher stakes in music piracy enforcement

The state of Tennessee and its public university system just raised the ante in this game of digital cat and mouse. Last year, Ars Technica reported that the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, had the fourth-highest number of copyright notices sent by the RIAA. Last week, as is reported today in Wired:

Combating music piracy at Tennessee's public university system is more important than hiring teachers and keeping down tuition costs.

Just-signed legislation requires the 222,000-student system to spend an estimated $9.5 million (.pdf) for file sharing "monitoring software," "monitoring hardware" and an additional "recurring cost of $1,575,000 for 21 staff positions and benefits (@75,000 each) to monitor network traffic" of its students.

Tennessee's measure, (.pdf) approved Wednesday by Gov. Phil Bredesen, was the nation's first in a bid to combat online file sharing within state-funded universities. The law, similar versions of which the Recording Industry Association of America wants throughout the United States, comes as the Tennessee public university system is increasing tuition, laying off teachers and leaving unfilled vacant instructor positions to battle a $43.7 million shortfall.

The law is the first of its kind in the nation.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation opines,

Unfortunately, the entertainment industry lobby seems to be succeeding, bit-by-bit, in persuading legislators to coerce universities into buying "infringement suppression" technologies -- expensive technologies that won't stop file sharing on campus networks. Even if the technologies did work (magical thinking in light of encryption), does anyone think they would somehow force students back into record stores or the iTunes Store? After all, today students on campus can swap multiple gigabytes hand-to-hand for pennies (see, e.g., blank DVD-R disks, or the price of portable hard drives, as well as the ease of copying from iPod to iPod).

It makes no sense to force universities to spend millions on technologies that will hobble innovation on campus while failing to stop file-sharing. Why not use those millions to compensate creators and copyright owners, and thereby make file-sharing legal, instead? Now, more than ever, the universities need to come forward with a collective licensing proposal that will protect their campus communities and their own bottom lines.

I have to side with the EFF on this one. If universities are going to support intellectual and artistic endeavor, then they should be funding file-swapping systems that reimburse artists and (to a lesser extent, in my lefty view) recording labels instead of just compensating the RIAA for its legal fees. (Note: Some universities are siding with their students instead of with the RIAA.)

In addition, many universities don't need any more bureaucracy or stricter cybersecurity policies--trust me on this one. My own campus employs 28,000 people and many of the staff are finding themselves on computers and office networks so locked down that they have to bring personal laptops to work and hop on wireless networks to, well, get any work done.

The crackdown on music piracy on campuses of course also affects students. Earlier this month, the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, reported that some students have had to drop out of school in order to save up enough to pay the legal fees and fines associated with RIAA lawsuits.

First-year students in a Vanderbilt University course titled "Stealing in Music City" are looking for a more equitable solution. The instructors of the course explain their motives:

“We are challenging the students to re-invent the music industry for a fair model of music distribution to compensate artists, consumers and labels,” said Holling Smith-Borne, director of the music library at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music. The class, divided into three groups, will propose three solutions during class on Dec. 2.

Smith-Borne and Sara Manus, education and outreach librarian, developed the course after the Recording Industry Association of America sued college students, some at Vanderbilt, for illegally downloading music. Manus and Smith-Borne felt there was a need to help educate students on these issues.

“It’s amazing to me how many students don’t understand the legalities of sharing intellectual property and copyrighted material,” Manus said. “But none of the students have had an education in copyright law – they listen to their peers about what they can and cannot do.”

Music isn't the only form of intellectual property that 21st-century students are downloading and remixing. Texts, video, non-music audio, still images, and more--in the public domain or not--are all fair game, in students' and some scholars' view, when they can be so easily accessed online. (For a fascinating overview of 20th- versus 21st-century issues surrounding intellectual property, check out Lawrence Lessig's video "Read-Write Culture".)

Diana Kimball at Digital Natives says that today's college students see the Internet as the only reasonable way to build a music library:

Well, “right” and “wrong” feel suspiciously similar when both are accessed through desktop clients. One of the main findings of Born Digital regarding piracy was that, out of a sample group of Digital Natives, 90% engaged in “illegal downloading.” The other 10% downloaded music through iTunes. But only when their parents had given them gift cards to do so. For Digital Natives, downloading songs through Limewire or similar programs doesn’t feel “wrong,” necessarily. Downloading music through iTunes doesn’t feel “right.” Both feel, very simply, like the obvious way to get music: through a desktop client that pulls songs down from the cloud. And that feeling of obviousness is the new thick black line to be reckoned with. No record label, however beloved, is going to convince Digital Natives to retreat to CDs. Though the record labels are getting used to this fact—throwing their weight behind services like imeem and warming up to the new media marketplace of iTunes—it’s still a stark, confronting reality for many in the traditional music business.

It’s not that kids don’t have morals. It’s that they don’t understand why anyone would ever get music any other way.

Student and faculty records

The kind of surveillance of students being undertaken by Tennessee is nothing new, but universities have not always been the ones behind it. For example, the U.S. Department of Education released millions of student loan application forms to the FBI following the terrorist attacks on September 11.

More recently, as reported in Inside Higher Ed,

[A]dvocates for colleges and students are more than a little concerned — okay, freaked out — by a plan by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General to gather personally identifiable information from nine existing databases of grant, loan and contract recipients into one giant “data analytics system” and by the Education Department’s decision to waive certain privacy rules for the new records system.

[. . .]

The database will “store individually identifying information” — Social Security numbers, birth dates, and conceivably financial information about student aid applicants and their parents — about an enormously wide range of people, the department’s notice states: “Employees of the Department; consultants; contractors; grantees; advisory committee members or others who have received funds from the Department for performing services; students who have applied for Federal student financial assistance; Pell Grant recipients; borrowers of William D. Ford Federal Direct Loans, Federal Family Education loans, Federal Insured Student loans or Federal Perkins loans; owners, board members, officials, or authorized agents of postsecondary institutions; and individuals applying to the Department’s Office of Federal Student Aid for a personal identification number.”

That’s the first problem with the department’s plan, the college groups say: that it plans to “allow massive amounts of irrelevant, unnecessary, and erroneous information about U.S. citizens to be secretly compiled” in a centralized place.

That problem is exacerbated, they say, by the fact that the department, in a final regulation also published in the Federal Register on October 16, grants numerous waivers to the federal Privacy Act that will allow the inspector general to share information from its new database with other parties — other federal agencies, state law enforcement agencies, and even foreign governments — that request it and can persuade the department that they need it. And those disclosures can be permitted without notifying those whose information is being released or giving them a chance to correct flawed information.

Frightening. When did it become acceptable to thus surveil communities of people dedicated to the open sharing of ideas, to academic freedom, and to public service?

What are your views? Are these measures--against illegal downloads of intellectual property and against fraudulent uses of federal money--overreaching? Or are they just two more (large) tools to be used in enforcing the law?

Leslie Madsen-Brooks develops learning experiences for K-12, university, and museum clients. She blogs at The Clutter Museum, Museum Blogging, and The Multicultural Toybox.