Off Track? Record industry takes action against seven UVA students for illegal downloading

Off track?

Record industry takes action against seven UVA students for illegal downloading

BY BRENDAN FITZGERALD

The close-cropped, brown-eyed bulk of a young man sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 9, 2000, and offered his thanks to the committee's chairman, U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch. "Thank you for inviting me for my first visit to Utah and my first appearance before a Congressional committee." Nineteen years old at the time, the hopeful computer science major who had dropped out of Northeastern University got straight to the point: "Napster has broadened my own horizons in many ways that I never expected."

But Shawn Fanning should've started not with what Napster had done for him but what it had done for his roommate. During his testimony before the SJC, Fanning explained that he developed Napster, a centralized space on the Internet that allowed free trading of music and media—a virtual five-finger discount!—after a roommate at Northeastern complained to him about the "unreliability" of websites that hosted music files. By the time Fanning gave his testimony to the SJC, he claimed that the Napster community "number[ed] over 32 million." Or, if you will, a possible pairing of 16 million virtual roommates with another 16 million, linked by the notes-under-a-desk transfer of copyrighted media, spawned from a devil's advocate in his dorm.

In spring of 2000, another college dropout (University of Utah) named Justin Frankel would release Gnutella, a "peer-to-peer" file-sharing program used for the sole purpose of trading music. And during the same year, Jim Jokl, who was definitely not a college dropout but certainly a member, maybe unwittingly, of the burgeoning intercollegiate free-music scene and was director of the Communications and Systems Division for the University of Virginia's office of Information Technology and Communication (ITC), weighed in on "The Networking Future at UVA" for Virginia.Edu, the school's online ITC publication …