Testimony of Professor Cheryl Asper Elzy; Dean of University Libraries and Federal Copyright Agent; Illinois State University; Normal, Illinois; Before the Committee on Education and the Workforce Subcommittee on 21st Century Competitiveness,

U. S. House of Representatives

Hearing on "The Internet and the College Campus: How the Entertainment Industry and Higher Education are Working to Combat Illegal Piracy."

September 26, 2006

Chairman Keller, Congressman Kildee, and Members of the Committee:

Good morning. I am Cheryl Elzy, Illinois State University's Dean of University Libraries and our designated agent for notification of claims of infringement under Section 512(c) of the Copyright Act. In other words, I am the DMCA agent on campus. Thank you for the invitation to appear today to share with you Illinois State University's plans to address peer-to-peer downloading on our campus network by students, faculty, and staff. The overall project has come to be known in our discussions with various groups and internally as the Digital Citizen Project. I'm using this opportunity to testify today to tell you Illinois State's story of how this program evolved and what it involves.

After listening to the introductions of my illustrious and powerful colleagues here at the table today and then inevitably comparing my somewhat different set of credentials with theirs, you may inevitably be asking yourself why I am here. I have asked myself that very question many times over the last several days, actually. But why a librarian? Why not a Chief Information Officer or some other technology expert? Why is a librarian the campus DMCA agent? To us at Illinois State University the answers to all those questions make perfect sense. The four project leaders for Illinois State's Digital Citizen Project represent diverse perspectives. We have an academic CIO, a student technology director, a library dean, and a nationally known technology consultant. My operation interprets literally dozens of copyright questions almost daily. Copyright expertise on my campus, and on a lot of campuses across the country, is most intensively developed in the library. While copyright protects intellectual property, it is my library's job to put that property, that information, into the hands of the students, teachers, researchers, and casual readers who need it. Technology is only a means to an end in a whole lot of ways. Illegal peer-to-peer downloading is NOT a technology problem. It doesn't have a "technology" solution. It is about legal access to materials or information resources. It is connecting users with the right tools. It is education and changing behaviors. How we do that is what we have been exploring for the past eighteen months and will describe for you today.

ILLINOIS STATE UNIVERSITY AS AN INSTITUTION

Illinois State University is an institution of 20,261 students with 17,842 of those being undergraduates. The first public university in Illinois, Illinois State University was founded in 1857 as a teacher education institution, a tradition still very much in evidence today as Illinois State is among the top five producers of classrooms teachers in the nation and has more alumni teaching in classrooms today than any other university in the country. Our institution is a comprehensive University offering more than 160 major/minor options in six colleges delivered by around 700 outstanding faculty.

We embrace as our core values individualized attention to the unique educational needs and potential of each student placing the learner at the center of our teaching and research; public opportunity for an accessible, affordable education through high-quality programs, faculty, facilities, and technology; active pursuit of learning inside and outside the classroom; diversity underpinning a sense of community and an informed respect for differences among our faculty, students, and staff; and creative response to change through innovation in curriculum, pedagogy, research, creative activities, and public service. Students benefit from "the small-school feeling they get from this large university, and the incredible opportunities they encounter." (Yale Daily News Insider's Guide to Colleges, 2000)

Located in central Illinois about 100 miles south of Chicago, we attract first-generation college students; urban students who want to get away from home, but not too far; and downstate learners from large and small communities. As you might expect in the heart of farm country, the farm boys from the ag fraternity empty out on fall harvest weekends to help in the fields. Statewide and Chicago loyalties dictate that the halls across campus are bare when the Bears are on TV. Our football team is currently ranked Number 6 nationally in I-AA, and our student scholars are winning national awards for physics, actuarial science, civic engagement, and much more. We enjoy the highest retention rate in our history, along with the highest incoming GPA's and ACT scores. There is a lot of construction going on across campus that we both celebrate and suffer through. The campus has been selected as one of just eight universities nationwide to implement a student-centered political engagement initiative under the American Democracy Project sponsored by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. Despite continuing and severe budget problems, times are good at Illinois State University. We are proud that Illinois State's fortunes and reputation are on the rise with ambitious goals and accomplishments at the state, national, and international level.

GETTING AT THE PROBLEM

The point I want to make here is that we are a typical campus: great students, great faculty, never enough money or space or time. That's just exactly what virtually every other representative of every other campus would tell you. Our faculty teach, research, innovate, and share experiences. Our students like to do typical things: interact with professors they admire, volunteer for a lot of service projects, try to avoid studying whenever possible, once in a while maybe party a little too much, and, of course, listen to music and watch movies and videos. All in all, we have a terrific faculty, staff, and students.

Which brings us to the point of why you've asked me here today. Like every other campus across the country, our students, our faculty and staff, are not certainly bad. They don't carry off armloads of CD's from the local music store. They aren't ripping through Blockbuster with dozens of movies under their jackets. But dozens of studies in recent years have shown time and again that college students everywhere share music, a good deal of it without copyright permission. Add to that movies, videos, and television programs. And games. And software. There are some teachers on campuses everywhere bootlegging home copies of media to use in classrooms. Yes, I'm making some sweeping generalizations here, but you understand my point. Why would good people do such a thing? What leads them to think this is okay when it's not? Ethically, financially, legally or morally.

My own simple answer, in part, is that the technology today makes it easy. But perhaps a more accurate answer is that, for the most part, they don't really know any better or don't care. All their friends and colleagues do it. They think it's not hurting anyone really. It's anonymous, quick, direct, and easy. To put this very, very simplistically, "it's just once, just one copy." And then another and another. But there is no one easy solution, no shrink-wrap fix that will make this problem or the DMCA complaints go away. The solution to this overwhelming and all-pervasive problem lies in education coupled with enforcement of existing laws and direct avenues to legal ways of getting the tunes, the tracks, the games, and the videos that are an integral part of today's student and faculty lives.

We all know, or at least suspect, the scope of the problem. It's national. It's worldwide. It's bigger than we'd first imagined and a significant problem, we think, for higher education. Frankly it's a problem at all levels of education, including K-12. You've been provided lots of numbers from lots of sources and from practically every perspective. You don't need me to add to your information overload. You know there is a problem with students, and in some respects, faculty and staff, downloading media for which they have not paid. My purpose here today is not to talk about the global landscape or the national picture. I'm here to share what one university in the great corn desert of Middle America is trying to do to address not just the problem of illegal downloading, but its comprehensive root cause.

That is not to say that Illinois State has all the answers. We certainly do not. We don't know what works because, after eighteen months of difficult and time-consuming work, we are only just publicly launching the Digital Citizen Project. We don't have a lot of results to report yet because we're just gearing up. But working with the associations represented here today [the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America], consulting with leading professional associations like EDUCAUSE and the American Council on Education, and finally collaborating with the nation's principal network monitoring developers as well as legal music and video source corporations [Audible Magic, Red Lambda, Apple, Cdigix, Ruckus, Pass Along Networks, and XM Satellite Radio+Napster], we have designed what we feel is a comprehensive program to address downloading issues. We've even gone beyond our own campus to invite an academic colleague, Dr. Samuel C. McQuade III from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a nationally recognized expert on cyber crime, to join our research and investigative team later this fall to explore the social and psychological aspects of illegal downloading and compare results from our two institutions.

More about the Digital Citizen Project in a bit, though. Let's back up to how we started eighteen months ago.

THE BACKGROUND OF ILLINOIS STATE'S DIGITAL CITZEN PROJECT

As the University's DMCA agent, I'm the one who formally receives any copyright complaints filed by individuals, associations, or corporations. Like any good administrator, I delegate. I have a group of exceptional colleagues who do the actual work of managing the complaints: network engineers, appropriate use coordinators, paralegals in the student judicial office, copyright experts within the library. But it's my name out in front.

As the DMCA agent and as a librarian whose core mission is to provide access to information and materials my university community needs, I became increasingly dismayed a couple of years ago as the number of copyright complaints began increasing dramatically. In 2001, 2002, and 2003 we received a few scattered complaints throughout the year, but nothing particularly overwhelming. By 2004 Illinois State was seeing a little more DMCA activity, but in 2005 everything just seemed to explode across our screens. Sometimes there were days when we were getting 20 or 30 notices a day, several days a week, primarily from entertainment industry associations. In the fiscal year ending in June 2005, Illinois State University had received 477 formal DMCA complaints from the Business Software Alliance, the Entertainment Software Association, Sony, Fox, NBC, HBO, MPAA, and RIAA. The problems on campus were stemming from activity in the residence halls, Greek houses, other places on campus, and dial-up access. We even had the dubious distinction of managing complaints against our university's Office of Advancement, the Rec Center, and even some of our own technology operations that were hijacked by outside programs due to some worm-infected machines. Staff time to manage these increased exponentially. Our student judicial office saw much heavier traffic referred to them for discipline. Follow-ups and tracking seemed to take forever.

When we followed DMCA procedures and contacted users about their illegal files, responses from students ranged from tears to threats. Most students complied quickly when contacted. A few had complaints filed on materials that they actually owned legally. A few more shot back that "you can't look at my stuff", demonstrating a quaint naiveté about what can and can't be tracked on the Internet. "My brother's a lawyer, and he'll sue you" was another memorable response. A common come-back, and a somewhat concerning one frankly, was "I didn't know I had anything like this on my machine, honest." Did they really not know? The tears and fears about how to clean up their computers really hit us hard. It was frustrating that we could not respond to the students who begged us to "scan my machine to make sure I'm okay." Since we did not know how the complainants' search engines navigated our user files, we couldn't replicate that kind of search. We couldn't help our own users. Literally.

Naturally we began asking questions among those working in the appropriate use areas on campus. Why the sudden rise in numbers? Were our students doing more illegal downloading or were they just getting caught? Were we somehow targets of new enforcement campaigns? Why the rise at universities when the problem is so much more widespread? What was all this costing us? How much costly technological bandwidth was this taking besides the obvious investment in staff? How could we possibly be satisfied with simply reacting, instead of being proactive on the part of our students?

The pivotal moment for me personally came when we received four subpoenas for information on some of our Illinois State University students who were going to be sued in federal courts for copyright infringements. At that moment my campus was faced with decisions with no options particularly attractive. Do we comply (as other campuses had) or do we fight release of the information (as still other campuses had)? Do we warn the students about the subpoenas or do we stand aside? I think I felt this whole situation more deeply because I myself have a son attending Illinois State. What would I think or how would I react if this was my child? The truth is I'd be raising hell with the University for not protecting my son! Why did they let him do this? Why did they make it possible for him to get into this mess? Why didn't they block this kind of thing? Why wasn't someone watching?

The university complied with the subpoenas and provided the information. Then we stepped back to think and to plan. David Greenfield, who directs ISU's Student Technology Support Services and is the University's appropriate use coordinator, and I sat down with our technology consultant, Warren Arbogast of Boulder Management Group, to talk about how we could make this problem stop. What could we do to protect our students while still complying with the law? How could we educate and direct our students? What could we do to police ourselves?

The rather simple solution seemed to be, literally and in the exact words I used back in February a year ago, "Why don't we go ask them what they want us to do?" "Them" in this case was the Recording Industry Association of America. So we did.

Our consultant, who is based here in Washington, DC, went to the RIAA offices on DuPont Circle to pose our question. The fascinating thing looking back is that, initially, he was met with momentary silence. It certainly was not that RIAA didn't have any answers. It was just that no one had asked them the question out of the blue before. Indeed no institution had come directly to them unsolicited before. The great news is, though, that RIAA was willing to talk. A terrific and productive dialogue began almost immediately. That was the beginning of a great collaboration 18 months ago.

In the beginning phases of what came to be this Digital Citizen project, being trained scholars and researchers, we scanned the literature and technology landscape for what other institutions were doing to combat illegal downloading and reduce DMCA complaints. As complex and diverse as our institutions of higher education are across the country today, we expected that the approaches to the peer-to-peer file-sharing issues would be, and continue to be, equally complex and diverse.

We were right. Today more and more colleges and universities are taking significant steps to tackle the illegal downloading issues. But judging by what we could find in the professional literature eighteen months ago, the answer appeared to be: not much. We knew anecdotally that some institutions were actually throwing the complaints away. A number of institutions were delivering educational or public service campaigns, often with a unique local twist. There were a few that were putting up a single legal music or movie service and hoping students, in particular, would be attracted to it. Recently, Drexel University put up two legal music services rather than just one, offering both iTunes and Napster to their campus community. A few other universities simply shut down all bandwidth available for peer-to-peer activities of any kind, legal or not. Some reported limiting the amount of bandwidth available to peer-to-peer applications. All of these programs reported little or varying degrees of success. From our perspective, most universities and colleges seemed to be waiting for someone to prove to them that the problem was real and needed attention. Others were waiting for "the" solution.

ILLINOIS STATE UNIVERSITY'S DIGITAL CITIZEN PROGRAM

Back to the "what do they want us to do" question, though. Our colleagues at RIAA did ultimately provide us an answer. Their ideal program to address downloading was described as a "three-legged stool". Each leg requires the other to be successful, to be balanced. Those three legs were policing and enforcement of the network, providing legal options for digital media, and education. That's actually a very easy concept to grasp when described that way. But as our conversations continued over the ensuing months, with the Illinois State Digital Citizen Project leaders coming to Washington, DC for extensive meetings hosted by RIAA, and with several members of the RIAA executive staff coming to Illinois State's campus for day-long meetings with a variety of campus constituents serving on an advisory team, the three-legged stool evolved into something more closely resembling a six-legged bench.

This new concept incorporated the education, enforcement, and legal services aspects from early discussions, but subtle changes were emerging. Education was now first, not last. That was important to us as educators. Added to the mix were some unusual new features, some additional "legs". Near and dear to me as a librarian first and above all was a more clear definition of fair use of media in the classroom along with easier paths for copyright clearance of media we needed to use. We felt that faculty needed to model appropriate, legal behavior for their students, so we needed to make legal fair use as easy as possible. Further, all of us working on the Digital Citizen Project knew absolutely that downloading behaviors start much earlier than when a student arrives on a college campus. Their behaviors are learned in high school or before, at home, at school, and at play. K-12 education needed to be addressed. Finally, to entice students to a comprehensive program of legal, ethical online behavior it would be extremely desirable to be able to offer some sort of rewards for those who participated. So we ended up with our six-legged bench: education/public relations, institutional self monitoring and enforcement, an array of downloading services that are legal rather than only one, a curriculum of K-12 teachable moments at point of need, establishing legal/fair use in the classroom and beyond, and possible rewards for students participating as good digital citizens.

Overall, the long-term goal of ISU's Digital Citizen Project is to create a nationally recognized program that could be cost-effective, that is based on comparison and research of the products currently available, and that is replicable on other college campuses. We are far from there, but we're laying a solid foundation. And we absolutely know that there is no one-size-fits-all institutional solution. Not at all. But if a central place for education, conversation, trial, and admittedly error can get a foothold, then all of higher education benefits.

The education "leg" of the bench: In tackling the "leg" on education and public relations, we worked to build on some programs we already had in place. Illinois State has always offered technology orientation and educational programs for students, especially those new to campus. In the past few years, more time and attention has been placed on the ethics and practices of downloading. In Fall 2005, we supplemented campus-developed material with videos supplied by RIAA of "named" artists speaking on the subject. For Fall 2006, we utilized the new www.campusdownloading.com material including a segment of the video along with live student testimonies, as well as online and clicker-based surveys and educational modules. For a different perspective, our technology staff also used the new video material with technology student workers in a focus group setting. Future educational efforts will include spreading the message through library information literacy instruction and will be reinforced in the university's Tech Passport program. We will explore ads and public service announcements in student-targeted publications, web sites, campus TV and radio stations, and beyond. Eventually point-of-use software with educational modules on the ethics of Internet behavior will be utilized.

The self-monitoring and enforcement "leg" of the bench: Illinois State's network engineers are in the last phases of testing newly developed commercial monitoring and enforcement software that will be managed and operated by campus personnel for our campus community. This monitoring software tracks the content of peer-to-peer file transfers as it enters or leaves the campus network from the Internet. The monitoring software is designed to stop downloading of copyrighted material while educating the user. This reinforces institutional policies that prohibit all types of illegal behaviors on our campus network, including illegal downloads. The software will scan network traffic automatically for the electronic signatures of copyrighted material and interrupt a network user's online transaction if it is suspected that the activity is illegal. It is very important to note that the software only scans against databases of known copyrighted materials. Those databases are very small right now, relatively speaking. Very, very early indications are that only about half of Illinois State's peer-to-peer traffic even has an electronic signature right now. Back to the user, though. He or she will be directed to legal avenues of downloading the desired item. The monitoring software also provides a bit of education and the promise of penalties if the user attempts further illegal downloads. The activity does not involve "reading" a user's email. It is simply a scan of network traffic that blocks files identified as copyrighted, just as we scan and block network traffic identified as containing viruses.

The legal downloading services "leg" of the bench: ISU's Digital Citizen Program will offer a menu of legal downloading services offering music, movies, and other media at reduced costs covering the spectrum of portable devices options rather than supporting just one make, model, or manufacture. This provides the research opportunity to compare and contrast services, provide feedback to vendors on desired or needed improvements in what they offer, and track how users are attracted to various services through the purest form of evaluation: their business. Providing more than one platform also eliminates the excuse that a user's MP3 player doesn't work with whatever service is offered.

We're envisioning a program of legal downloading services that we are calling "Bird Trax", a name derived from our Illinois State athletic teams' name, the Redbirds. Students, faculty and staff may elect to opt into this legal option for downloading. It's important to remember that all participants and non-participants will be subject to the monitoring and enforcement of copyright protections. There won't be an avenue on the Illinois State network for illegal downloads. We may not be able to capture every incident, but we should identify most. By offering an opt-in program, if the network user is not someone who downloads, they don't have to participate. However, if a user tries to download a signatured electronic file, the activity will be stopped.

Bird Trax won't be financed by tuition or student fees. It won't be free, either. In today's market economy we feel users need to be conditioned to pay for what they use, so there will be charges attached to participation. The program's revenue stream will come from modest participation charges. We're modeling this on our school's athletic participation card program where students purchase a card to enter any number and types of athletic events. Students participating in the Bird Trax program will have access to the legal downloading services we're providing if they choose.

The K-12 education "leg" of the bench: Education, as said earlier, must start before students get to a college campus. However, asking any K-12 teacher to "teach" yet another course in their already full days won't work in our opinions. As an alternative, Illinois State University would like to capitalize on its nationally recognized College of Education and its K-12 lab schools on site to develop and test a K-12 curriculum with perhaps 50 or so "teachable moments" or learning modules to be utilized at the point of use. These might start the educational process on cyber ethics as early as 3rd or 4th grade. A teacher could incorporate a teaching moment or module on legal downloads of images, for example, when instructing young people on how to create Power Point presentations or slides.

The fair use "leg" of the bench: Similarly, teachers and professors need to model appropriate legal and ethical behavior. Current guidelines on educational fair use for media are unclear and hard to apply. While some in the higher education community like the vagueness and benefit from it because it leaves room for interpretation, others of us who work on the front lines really want some more specific guidance. Copyright permissions are very difficult to acquire. A classic concrete example emerged in the course of this project. Illinois State wanted to use some music video footage in one of its orientation programs in Fall 2005. We asked for a little help from our colleagues at RIAA, beginning the permission process in early April. We still could not secure permissions in August five months later, even with help from the very association that promotes legal use of media. If they can't get permissions in a timely fashion, then who can?

We have to make copyright permissions for in-class and academic use of pre-recorded music, movies, and television programs easier and faster. Ironically, this very issue came up here in the House Judiciary Committee last week as reported in CQ Today (September 20, 2006, page 15). There is or was a bill pending that would make copyright permissions easier to acquire for the digital music services. The bill (HR 6052) would "simplify the complex royalty system for the licensing of digital music, including music delivered over the Internet and via satellite radio." Can we not find a way to extend that simplification to libraries and educational institutions?

The rewards "leg" of the bench: To reward participants and encourage more participation in the program, Bird Trax hopes to offer incentives, rewards, carrots versus sticks, or whatever will work to keep them legal. While the dream might be to provide incentives such as free concerts, major movie premieres, workshops with noted artists, actors, and performers, or similar high-visibility events for those participants who have stayed legal through the year or the life of the program, more realistically we should at least be able to offer some free downloads, reduced subscriptions, or an array of vendor-related give-aways.

THE EARLY DATA

It is important to remember that we are only just beginning the research side of the Digital Citizen Project.

Downloading is a complex issue. Universities are complex operations. Deciphering technology is an extraordinary undertaking. Research is a complex task. To be effective, the Digital Citizen Project must be comprehensive. So the entire spectrum of what we're looking becomes exponentially complex.

In August 2005 we were able to test some monitoring systems that were just beginning to appear on the market. Using new monitoring hardware and software from Audible Magic for a short trial, we benchmarked a 17-day period in mid-August 2005 capturing a revealing snapshot of activity on our network. While this may seem like an odd time to collect data since the fall term was just starting, it was the point at which our partner company provided the program to capture the snapshot. Of the 13,000 computers on our network, only 26% used a peer-to-peer application, legal or illegal. That is a little less than 3,400 machines, a figure that is lower than any of us had expected. Of that figure, 97% of the traffic originated in the residence halls, indicating that we may be able to concentrate our educational efforts on those groups.

In April and August 2006 we performed studies similar to those of August 2005. In addition to trend information on network activity, bandwidth usage, electronic signatures, and content, these studies have also begun to yield some new data about darknets, which are peer-to-peer networks whose traffic remains on campus.

We also took the opportunity this summer to survey high school seniors who were coming to campus to register for classes at ISU. Notice, please, I'm not calling them college freshmen, but rather high school seniors. Their attitudes and behaviors had been established before any exposure to our campus. We probed their use of digital media and what kind of mobile players they used. Of the 217 responding students, 89% reported they had a portable music player. 67% of those devices are Apple iPods with the rest scattered among 26 different kinds of players. 93% played music and 51% watched movies/TV/videos from their computers. When asked how these incoming students acquired their music and movies, the responses demonstrated an extreme range of sources from actually buying CDs to commercial services like iTunes. Various P2P networks such as Limewire, Bearshare, and Bit Torrent were mentioned by 39% of the seniors. While not testing the legal vs. illegal use of these networks, the naiveté we've seen elsewhere shown through as we found comments such as "Not legally", "pirate from XXXX" or "illegally downloaded". To us, this absolutely shows that our new students come with habits entrenched in a digital lifestyle. That is why the K-12 component of our program is so essential to any effort that seriously, and effectively, addresses illegal downloading activities in America's higher education community.

We quite honestly have mountains of data to analyze before we even formally start the Digital Citizen Project. We anticipate sharing some of our early findings at the upcoming EDUCAUSE national conference in Dallas on October 10. We would very much like to have had the data available and ready for today's hearing, but our time grew too short for an accurate, understandable review of the results. And it is obvious that we will accumulate far more hard data. We hope to soon hire research assistants to help us analyze the massive amounts of information we have if we can secure some outside funding. But, because our discs full of data promise to grow significantly with each passing day, analysis and management becomes part of the problem of running this project, which means finding enough staff time and personnel dollars to correctly run and research our results.

WHAT'S UNUSUAL ABOUT ISU'S DIGITAL CITIZEN PROJECT?

The multi-faceted, comprehensive approach that Illinois State University is taking to address illegal peer-to-peer sets it apart from most, if not all the campus programs that we're aware of. Because Illinois State is a national leader in the education field, it is natural and appropriate that we tackle the difficult and far-ranging challenges presented by K-12 cyber education. We know many agencies and institutions are creating programs of many kinds for the K-12 classroom. Illinois State would like to review, test, and compare all of those in our lab schools and professional development schools, offering advice and expertise to those interested in implementing such programs. Pursuing the point-of-need teachable moments is a different and appealing approach that we also want to develop.

Beyond the program itself, though, is the truly unique fact that we are working productively and positively with so many agencies, associations, and vendors who are engaged in this sometimes contentious area. To work closely with RIAA, seen by many campuses as almost the "enemy", has been a surprising and welcome endeavor. Adding the voice of MPAA to the Digital Citizen Project has provided still more encouragement, expertise, and direction.

Long-range, our hope at Illinois State is that we really will serve as a kind of "consumer's reports" on the digital media scene, testing, reviewing, and implementing new services as they emerge in the market while serving as a resource to higher education on the education side of this equation. We absolutely know that we very well may provide evidence of what DOES NOT work as much as what does. Illegal downloading may need far more effort and much broader approaches than we can bring to bear on the problem as a single institution, a single university.

Working with vendors to secure participation in our "consumer's report" approach to the downloading arena has had its challenges and successes. Convincing most of the vendors that they won't be the ONLY service or software at Illinois State University has been challenging, but it was something we needed to do for the integrity of the Digital Citizen Project and its research goals. At one extreme, our project and our expertise has been so valued that we are working in complete partnership to develop new modules and releases of one service. At the other end of the spectrum, we have been completely ignored in our repeated attempts to bring one of the leaders in the downloading field into our project. Some vendors who really want to be a part of ISU's Digital Citizen Project and Bird Trax just aren't ready for complete implementation and roll-out yet, so we hope to include those in Phase II of the research and offerings.

CONCLUSION

As we prepare for full launch of our Digital Citizen Project and Bird Trax later this fall, we know we've come a long way and have far to go. We have the attention of the major entertainment associations, many vendors, satellite radio, the higher education professional associations, and even some studios. The entertainment industry is very supportive of the monitoring and enforcement side as well as our trials of service providers. The educational and public relations aspects are not quite as attractive to them yet, nor is the need for effective K-12 teaching resources. But perhaps with your help and encouragement, we will get there.

Downloading music, movies, and games is a symptom, an outcome. It is not THE problem. The problem is changing behavior, almost changing a culture. The media industry needs to change its business model because peer-to-peer isn't going to go away. Higher education, and education in general, needs to adapt to this all-pervasive change in student desires for mobile music, movies, and entertainment. It's a part of their lives. That will take time, education, and constant reinforcement for years to come. Getting teachers to use all intellectual properties legally is an important signal. Getting young people, not to mention their older fringe hippie wannabee counterparts, to use music and movies legally is the core goal.

Illinois State University can have a significant impact on peer-to-peer behaviors in another, more subtle way. As was said very early in this paper, Illinois State's teacher education graduates number in the top five in the nation. 800 new teachers walk out our doors each year, and each teacher will influence the lives of 20-30 children each year. If Illinois State's graduates can learn good Digital Citizen behaviors while on campus, they will imprint that legal and ethical perspective on perhaps 20,000 children annually. ISU's program can be the pebble in the pond with its impact having a dramatic ripple effect in classrooms around the state and nation.

Your help is essential to directing the conversations toward education starting with the nation's very young, and your support for a national conversation on practical fair use and copyright permissions, can point the way to creating great role models. Your support for comprehensive efforts like our Digital Citizen Project, with funding and with using us as a resource for higher education in general, will be invaluable.

For more information visit www.digitalcitizen.ilstu.edu