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Opening Statement of Chairman Ric Keller Subcommittee on 21st Century Competitiveness Hearing on: September 26, 2006 Good morning. I am pleased to convene today's hearing to discuss illegal downloading and piracy of copyrighted material through college and university computer networks. The purpose of today's hearing is to talk more about illegal downloading, and to highlight innovative ways in which some universities across the country are dealing with this problem. The university environment creates a perfect storm for piracy. College students, who are computer and internet savvy, use state-of-the-art computers and the fastest computer networks in America to find the music, movies and other entertainment products that they love. The downside is some college students engage in illegal peer-to-peer file sharing, which can allow viruses to invade the networks, and to take up valuable space on the college servers which should be used for legitimate, educational purposes. In addition, a recent survey determined that piracy by college students accounted for over $500 million in losses to America’s film industry alone. Let me give you a brief demonstration of how this illegal file sharing takes place. File-sharing applications allow millions of computer users around the world to connect and trade unauthorized copies of copyrighted works, including music, movies, and software. These file-sharing applications are freely available on the Internet and are easy to download and install. When you start up the application – in this case, Limewire – you are presented with this window to begin your search. You type a term in the search field – for example, typing in “Kenny Chesney” will search for all works by that artist. You see that, immediately, you are presented with a number of results – in this case, pages of Kenny Chesney songs, free for downloading from users all over the world. Selecting one song in the list will begin the download process. You can watch the progress of the download at the bottom of the window. Downloading time is very fast, usually a minute or less, and multiple downloads can be done at one time. Here, we’ve searched for one musician’s works but, again, it’s just as easy to find thousands of movies, software titles, and other copyrighted works. Once the download is complete, you can select the file, and launch the built-in player to listen to the song right then and there. From launch, to search, to download, to listening – the entire process took less than 2 minutes. These are the types of applications, without appropriate protection measures, that have caused great concern on the part of the entertainment and other content industries. These are also the types of applications that are prevalent on college campuses across the country, forming the basis of our discussion today. The good news is that while universities are at the center of this storm, they are also in the best position to confront the problem. To help them, in March of this year, the House passed H.R. 609, which reauthorized the Higher Education Act and included language, at my request, to allow universities to use federal funds to combat this problem. Piracy is not a new issue for Congress. I am a member of the Judiciary Committee’s Intellectual Property Subcommittee where my good friend, Lamar Smith, has held 3 hearings on this subject. In addition, Chairman Buck McKeon has wisely called for a “renewed commitment” to addressing the illegal downloading of copyrighted material on college campuses. I hope that today's discussion encourages universities to take a fresh look at what's going on on their own campuses and helps them to focus their efforts. We have a very impressive group of witnesses this morning, and I look forward to hearing from them, as well as my esteemed colleagues. I now yield to the Ranking Member Mr. Kildee for his opening comments. |