Google. Click. Facebook. Click. Wikipedia. Click. Copyright theft. Click?

In the last two years, there have been 1,892 notices of copyright violations by students at the University of Illinois using the University’s network, according to Ben Morton, assistant director of the Office for Student Conflict Resolution. The University, along with other institutions across the country, is trying to devise ways to educate students about the legal dangers of using distributed file sharing networks.

For Brian Hoskins, junior in LAS, the first step of this education was getting caught.

Hoskins began downloading music in high school. A friend had told him that he had downloaded the entire discography of an artist. Hoskins went home and found out how to do it himself.

“I’m going to be honest. Yeah, it’s piracy. I don’t really have a way to justify it,” Hoskins said.

Hoskins stopped buying CDs and DVDs in retail stores, and obtained his music and TV shows by using distributed networks like BitTorrent and websites like thepiratebay.com.

During his freshman year, while living in FAR, Hoskins’s dorm room Internet was turned off. He received an e-mail from his resident director (RD) informing him that the copyright holder of a movie he had downloaded had contacted the university. Hoskins talked to his RD, who told him about “how it was wrong” to illegally download movies, and wrote a one-page paper. His Internet was turned back on shortly afterward.

Hoskins said that he never made the connection between ‘real’ theft and downloading.

“You never really look at it that way when you’re doing it. But if you think about it, it is stealing,” he said.

Morton meets with two or three students like Hoskins every day.

“We have concerns that from an educational perspective, students don’t understand that that’s against the law,” Morton said. “The purpose of them coming in to meet with me…is to help them understand that that’s basically the same thing as walking into the store, taking the DVD or CD, sticking it in your backpack and walking out with it.”

Morton only meets with students who committed a copyright violation while using the University’s wireless service or VPN, which amounts to about 70 to 80 students per semester. Most of the students who account for the 1,892 violations in the last two years used networks located in University housing.

Morton said that many students think that the University is only interested because the violation occurred on its network.

“Regardless of what network people are using to download, it’s still against the law and it would still violate the rules of the institution,” he said.

The policy of cooperative relationship between universities and institutions that represent the entertainment industry (like the Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Picture Association of America) is a relatively new one.

“The RIAA, at one time, had a very active policy of suing students to make examples of them,” said Peter Maggs, a law professor at the University.

“(That) policy sort of backfired. It sort of made them look like bullies. And suing some student for $100,000 and winning and making him drop out of college didn’t give them a good name.”

According to Maggs, suing students did not lower the number of violations, and so the entertainment industry moved to pressure Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and universities to police their own networks to preserve their own legal immunity from litigation from copyright holders.

However, even though the entertainment industry is generally no longer suing students, it still focuses on holding students accountable.

Also, institutions like the RIAA have mostly stopped suing companies, as was its policy for most of the last decade, when high profile lawsuits brought down Napster, Kazaa and others.

Maggs said that going after the companies as the cause of the problem wasn’t effective, because distributed networks do not possess the traditional distinction between ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’ by which other illegal enterprises are defined.

“If you’re trying to take out a drug ring, you would go after the drug kingpin or the drug wholesaler, but with the totally distributed file sharing there wasn’t any kingpin or wholesaler to go after,” he said.

According to Indranil Gupta, associate professor of computer science, distributed networks, like BitTorrent, function only as infrastructures that allow users to transfer files among themselves.

Gupta says that the popularity of file sharing networks is twofold: Users can obtain nearly any piece of media for free, and the technology of distributed networks allows these files to be downloaded at very high speeds.

“College campuses are the biggest source of downloads and uploads,” Gupta said. “Also, college campuses have some of the best high bandwidth anywhere in the U.S.”

Hoskins no longer lives in a University dorm and says that he occasionally downloads a CD or TV episode. Now, if he really likes a show he will buy the box set.

Perhaps, the last step of Hoskins’s education is grappling with the ethical implications of his actions.

“I’m starting to feel pretty guilty,” Hoskins said.