Oversight Hearing on "Reducing Peer-To-Peer (P2P) Piracy on University Campuses: A Progress Update."

Abstract

Recently, the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property held a hearing entitled "Reducing Peer-to-Peer Piracy on University Campuses: A Progress Update." Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) began the hearing by announcing that he and Ranking Member Howard Berman (D-Calif.) would be requesting a study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on how well each U.S. campus was curtailing illegal file sharing, asking that the GAO "assign a grade" to each institution. Daniel Updegrove, CIO of the University of Texas at Austin, testified that a program of bandwidth limitation, education, and enforcement had significantly reduced the problem of unauthorized file sharing at his university. Norvert Dunkel, director of housing at the University of Florida, talked about a system developed at Florida called Icarus, which automatically disconnects students from the campus network when they connect to P2P services. Concerns were raised by other witnesses, however, that file-sharing activity was moving to campus intranets and to the Internet2 network.