In spite of being a punishable offense, illegal downloading is a discreet presence on campus.

“It’s really hard to do it on campus because you have to get around the school, which is difficult, so most people don’t try to download anything,” said freshman information management major Steven Ragnauth. “You have to have the serious intent to do it.”

The difficulty of illegally downloading media on AirOrangeX is the result of supervision by SU’s Information Technology and Services, which monitors the network and disciplines offenders.

The monitoring process is largely autonomous, only involving staff when copyright holders discover illegal sharing and send a notice of copyright infringement to ITS, said Christopher Croad, director of Information Security, in an email. 

ITS technicians do not actively watch network activity, leaving most of the monitoring to devices placed on the network that detect peer-to-peer sharing protocols and immediately shut them down, Croad said.

While cases of illegal downloading do occur on campus, ITS Senior Consultant Shefali Haldar said it does not happen frequently.

If caught illegally downloading a file, first-time offenders are “quarantined” from the AOX network. However, they can still use other computers on campus.

In order to remove the quarantine, students must delete the illegal file and downloading software, have the removal verified by an ITS consultant and sign an agreement saying they understand the SU network use policy.

Haldar said she has never seen a student punished beyond being quarantined.

There are ways around ITS’ anti-piracy system, said Forrester Pickett, a freshman computer engineering major.

Pickett has spent years researching online forums and tutorials on torrenting, a method of downloading pieces of the same file from multiple sources on a peer-to-peer network and reassembling them back into a single file.

Information on how to do this, Pickett said, can easily be found on Google.

“A lot of what I’ve found is from the Internet, from forums. But there’s definitely a skill to Googling. You can’t just ask Google questions; it’s all about knowing the right words, keywords, knowing your way around,” he said.

Torrenting small files is not difficult, said Tom Kovalcik, a sophomore in the L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Science . The process could be as simple as extracting audio from a YouTube video, he said.

Other students have resorted to using the wireless Internet Starbucks on Marshall Street, taking advantage of its proximity to campus and unmonitored Internet access.

For students like Jonathan Bridges, a sophomore in the L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science, the debut of Internet radio stations has replaced the need to illegally download files.

Said Bridges: “I don’t have much use for it now since they have Internet radio like Pandora, which is pretty ingenious because artists get paid when I listen to their songs.”

Published on September 13, 2012 at 2:01 am

Contact Natsumi: najisaka@syr.edu