File sharing has been making big news in the US ever since the advent of Napster in June of 1999. While file sharing technology is legal, the vast majority of multimedia files being exchanged over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are copyrighted, making such exchanges illegal under intellectual property right laws. Since Napster’s heyday, album sales are down by thirty percent and the film industry is losing an estimated $5.5 billion to movie piracy annually. Since 2003, the recording industry has sent thousands of cease-and-desist letters to illegal file swappers the nation over and has thus far filed suit against over 17,000 people, including an estimated 1,000 students.

This year, the Supreme Court took up the issue, unanimously ruling in the case of MGM v. Grokster that creating new technology that enables copyright infringement is not illegal, but that actively encouraging it is. It comes as little surprise then that sharing copyrighted files is also still certified illegal. That being the case, hardly anyone seems to have noticed. Billions of files are being exchanged over P2P networks every month and while a new crop of paid services like iTunes and Yahoo Music has emerged over the last several years, the fact remains that ten times as many songs are downloaded illegally through P2P networks than through all the paid services combined.

It seems that while many file sharers would openly acknowledge that their activity is illegal, few would describe their activity as unethical or morally troubling. While the recording industry (RIAA) has equated downloading copyrighted files with lifting a CD from a musician’s rack, such a connection is often lost on even the most casual downloader. This seems to be a measure of two things.

First, many independent musicians have begun openly distributing their music on the Internet. According to some copyright experts, the large majority of artists lose very little from copyright infringement; it is the corporate labels and big name acts that lose the most. In the face of rising album costs, few file sharers have expressed sympathy for the handful of superstars and record execs that stand to lose a small share of their millions.

Second, the Internet has, over the past decade, revolutionized popular perceptions about what constitutes intellectual property rights and how intellectual property should be distributed. In 2000, Charles C. Mann, a writer for the Atlantic Monthly, referred to the P2P phenomenon as the “heavenly jukebox,” a “vast intellectual commons [where] nothing will ever again be out of print or impossible to find; every scrap of human culture transcribed, no matter how obscure or commercially unsuccessful will be available to all.”

The growth of open source projects in programming has furthered this notion of a “heavenly jukebox.” Under the open source model, projects are made available to the larger community to modify and redistribute as it sees fit. The driving aim behind open source is to reduce copyright restrictions and cut costs to the consumer, opening up widespread public access to products and thereby facilitating innovation and exchange. Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, currently on sabbatical in Berlin, has backed this movement, advocating the decriminalization of file sharing and a legal redefinition of intellectual property under what he calls the “Creative Commons,” a more limited and artist-defined notion of copyright that makes cultural products freely available while still securing a sense of ownership and commercial reward for the producer. Lessig has argued that inflexible copyright laws come at the expense of both the artist and the consumer. Though Lessig could not be reached for comment for this editorial, he has gone on the record in the NY Times as saying that ‘’the freedom to remix, not just words, but culture’’ is essential to continued creative development.

Unfortunately, until legal headway is made, the University must abide by copyright statute unless it wishes to open itself up to legal action. In 2003, Provost Etchemendy outlined the policy in a statement to the university community, pressing that “Stanford is committed to facilitating access to information through its computer networks as part of its mission to pursue research and create knowledge. However, the University’s research and teaching mission also depends on respect for the rights of intellectual property and the university will not facilitate the pirating of intellectual property through its computer networks.” He further warned that “sharing music, videos, software and other copyrighted material in violation of copyright laws can expose you and others to legal sanctions, as well as sanctions under Stanford’s policies.”

Such a policy makes good sense, for the moment. If the University were seen to endorse copyright infringement, it could be subject to the same kind of suit Grokster faced and then lost. Further, illegal file sharing can introduce spyware and viruses into the University network. However, since it appears that many students continue to engage in file sharing despite the University’s best efforts, it makes sense to provide a legal opt-out alternative to students and faculty such as Yahoo! Music Services.

Yahoo! Music, which was offered for free to students last year and is currently being offered at a reduced rate, has its drawbacks. While file-sharing networks boast some 25 million files, there are no more than two million files offered by any legal service and only just over a million offered by Yahoo. More problematically, Yahoo does not operate on Macs and users must pay extra fees to add songs to portable music players. On the plus side, it only costs about $20 a year for unlimited downloads from a wide selection of music, and if the university ran an opt-out program, students could choose whether or not to take advantage of the service.

Yahoo! Music may or may not be the best service currently available, but it does serve as a good example of an attractive option the university could offer students to reduce the amount of copyright infringement and to promote a new culture of exchange. Currently, models of P2P networks are in development that will allow for legal file exchange at minimal cost. It would be in the best interest of the University to explore such services for the upcoming year and to evaluate the possible benefits of offering students alternatives.