Published: Monday, February 16, 2009 in The Whitworthian.

I really hate pirates.
Before you get your swords out, let me clarify:  I do not hate the fine students of Whitworth University; nor do I despise those less-than-noble buccaneers of old who were so fond of scallywagging about the high seas.

The ones that I have issues with, the ones that make me want to launch dramatically into a tongue-lashing tirade, are the Internet pirates. Specifically for this article, Internet pirates currently dwelling at Whitworth.

If you’re one of the ones who shares your iTunes library with your friends, uploads copyrighted movies for your friends to download or uses the Whitworth network to distribute any other kind of copyrighted file, I’m looking at you.  If you’re one of the ones who uses LimeWire to get and share free music, BitTorrent to get and share free games, movies or more unsavory things, I’m looking at you.

If you’re not one of those ones, then you should join me in looking at them, because they are making all our lives harder.

Let me explain.

When I first set out to write this article, I had it in my mind to slap the wrist of Whitworth’s network management because of our notoriously low Internet speeds on campus. I even had the article written and turned in to my editor.

I then had a chance to sit down and talk with Walt Seidel, Whitworth’s network manager, who showed me some of the nuts and bolts of how the whole thing works here.  And I still think that there’s room for improvement on their end. Our network is just slower than most other schools’.  But the bulk of the blame doesn’t rest with the faculty; the pirates are at fault.

Picture all of the school’s available bandwidth (connection speed) as a mighty river. Now imagine that river split into several tributaries of varying size, each tributary representing one group of people at Whitworth. Faculty have a tributary; students have a few different ones, depending on how and where they’re connecting; guests to the network have one; and there are a few others. Each of these tributaries is governed by a dam of sorts, a gateway that only allows so much water through.

The faculty have an unlimited connection. Their tributary isn’t dammed and they can have as much bandwidth as is available to them. The students’ connection, on the other hand, is dammed rather severely. Download speeds are unaffected. When you buy a song on iTunes, it downloads as fast as the network is capable of. But uploads are choked down to a trickle. This affects everything from e-mailing to online gaming to posting pictures to Facebook. It makes using the Internet a chore.

Why have we been restricted? What is this censorship? Where can we gather for picketing?

At the door of that pirate you know.

File-sharing is the only reason our network speeds have been capped so severely.  File-sharing eats up bandwidth. If it wasn’t regulated somehow, a few people sharing large files over the network would hog all the bandwidth and every other student on campus would suffer from speeds even slower than they are now.

And unfortunately, there are only two real options for regulating file-sharing: install invasive snooping software that examines the contents of everything that goes through the network, or slowing the connection speed down far enough that people don’t use it for file-sharing.  Whitworth has opted for the second option; it’s part of what Clean Access Agent does.

Is all file-sharing illegal pirating? No, but the vast majority of it is. However you try to justify it, it’s stealing. And if people would stop doing that, the problem would largely disappear and we could have our bandwidth back.

Slow Internet speeds are one of the biggest complaints that I hear from on-campus students. The ironic thing is, often the next thing out of their mouth is something about how they got that hot new album off of LimeWire for free. Several proverbs about “making your own bed” come to mind.

If you’re someone who does this nefarious stuff, don’t try to tell yourself it’s not really hurting anyone. It is hurting a lot of someones: an entire campus worth of students who have to suffer with a maddeningly slow Internet connection. And down the road there could be more consequences. The rate at which Whitworth has been receiving complaints from the RIAA (the Recording Industry Association of America – the ones in charge of tracking down pirates) has nearly tripled just in the last few months. If that trend keeps up, a more invasive approach to stopping copyright pirates will have to be taken.

The alternative, of course, is a bit foreign to many college students: actually buying and legally owning your own music and movies. What a concept.