MEMORANDUM March 16, 2000 TO: NC State Students, Faculty and Staff FROM: Samuel F. Averitt, Vice Provost for Information Technology SUBJECT: Napster and similar MP3 search engine/download Internet programs In February, 2000 more than 100 American universities reportedly restricted access to Napster, an Internet program that enables those logged into a Napster server to search for, download, and share thousands of MP3 digital music files. Erroneously, North Carolina State University was listed on the Students Against University Censorship site (http://www.savenapster.com) as one of those universities, and as a result our name appeared in the media as a major campus that had banned Napster. This is not the case, and we have since had our name removed. Nevertheless, the incident has led to requests that we restate our position on censorship of student use of the university network in general and our position on Napster and similar programs in particular. NC State network policy has long been that we do not censor Internet traffic except as may be appropriate in response to official complaints and in the case of illegal activity. Part of our mission is to foster student engagement and responsible experimentation with the latest technologies. Thanks in part to the high-speed Internet access and our ResNet program, students in on-campus housing have formed an informal but lively learning community which we see as a significant educational opportunity at NC State. We are very reluctant to censor these activities. Illegal activity is of course forbidden on the NC State network. This is clearly stated in the rules and regulations governing personal use of NC State’s computing systems and network. These regulations are widely distributed and published online. (See North Carolina State University Administrative Regulations, section III, Personal Use: http://www.ncsu.edu/policies/informationtechnology/REG08.00.2.php.) Although the Napster program is not itself illegal, it can be used for the illegal download and distribution of MP3s. Downloading or distributing material without permission of the copyright holder is a violation of federal and state law, even if it is not for profit. The penalties can be significant, including imprisonment and fines. Our refusal to censor access to the Napster site in no way condones violations of copyright or intellectual property laws. Some universities have restricted access to Napster and similar programs because heavy bandwidth use among users of these applications had a significant impact on their university network. Although Napster is popular at NC State, we enjoy much greater bandwidth to the common Internet via NCREN than the vast majority of colleges and universities who may have only two or three T1 connections to their ISP. Any one of NCREN's OC-3 connections has many times the capacity that most smaller schools have in total. Recently, Napster has represented an average of 8 Mbps of total aggregated outbound network traffic. While this is a lot for a single application, NC State network functioning as a whole has not been affected. However, if excessive bandwidth use by Napster or similar programs were to degrade the performance of instructional, research, or key business activities on the NC State network, we may choose to put a limit on bandwidth availability to targeted areas of the campus network. This would not be a censorship of access to a particular site, but simply a prudent measure to assure that the university’s computing systems are not overloaded and that resources are equitably shared. Finally, users of Napster, iMesh, iCast, Macster, Spinfrenzy and similar programs need to be aware of the potential security threat they are exposing themselves to when using these applications. Many do not understand that their computer becomes a server when they use these programs. Some of the newer applications automatically start serving shared files as soon as the computer is connected to a network, and most do not stop the server portion of the application when the user exits the main program. Instead, the server remains active while the computer is on, and users are often unaware that they are sharing files even when away from their computers. With some programs, it is very easy for users to share portions of their hard drives that could easily expose them to intruders who could download password files, various cache files, and other personal information. Back To Computing Rules & Regulations