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Students at one Missouri university don't just have to take surprise quizzes on economics, chemistry, or Spanish these days. They also get pop quizzes on digital copyright law. The online test aims to prevent piracy and violation of copyright laws, and if students want access to peer-to-peer file sharing, they have to ace it.

According to an Associated Press report, the Missouri University of Science and Technology now requires students to correctly answer six questions about digital copyright law before they can use peer-to-peer tools. If they pass the test, they get six hours of access to the software.

Students are limited to eight monthly stints (of six hours consecutive each) with peer-to-peer software during the academic year, and they must take the test each time they want to use it. The school, located in Rolla, Mo., near the Ozarks, introduced the test as an alternative to taking away access to peer-to-peer file sharing from students and faculty.

A fear of lawsuits from the recording industry has prompted many schools to suspend access altogether. In November, Congress began pushing schools receiving federal funding to develop alternatives--such as subscription-based services or technology-based deterrents--to prevent students from engaging in copyright violations and piracy.

In May, a new law passed in Tennessee requiring any higher-education institution in the state to develop and enforce a policy that prohibits its students from committing copyright infringement.

Tim Doty, Missouri S&T campus systems security analyst, told the AP that the school still wanted to allow peer-to-peer access, "but in a controlled fashion. We're providing them the information to make an informed decision."

Doty said the pre-access quiz appears to be the first such test on a U.S. campus, and he says it cut complaints from the recording industry from 200 during the 2006-2007 school year to a mere eight in the school year just wrapping up.

Unlike regular school quizzes, once students pass this one, it's not the end of the story. If Missouri S&T students don't follow the copyright rules, they can lose their Internet privileges or be reprimanded with fines, community service, research projects, or even suspension.

A painstaking examination of how the RIAA goes about its business hunting down file sharers on college campuses is available online.

The Chronicle of Higher Education visited the offices of the Recording Industry Association of America and got a demonstration.

The RIAA employee, who declined to give his or her name for fear of receiving hate mail, said the organization has hired online copyright enforcer MediaSentry to do most of the heavy lifting. MediaSentry writes scripts to automatically hunt for the names of copyright songs and locate the IP addresses of computers sharing files, and forwards the information to the RIAA.

If a university or college is involved, the RIAA sends a takedown notice to campus network administrators. The RIAA says it doesn't target specific schools. It's interesting to note that MediaSentry checks the hashes (identifying marks) on the song files to make sure they match the copyright song. If the marks don't match, the company uses software from Audible Magic to compare sound waves.

There aren't too many surprises about how the RIAA goes after serious offenders, but the story is worth reading.

Consumers are being warned that they may get an ad instead of a music or video file on several file-sharing sites in what security firm McAfee says is the most significant malware outbreak in three years.

McAfee Avert Labs reported on Tuesday that more than 500,000 detections of a Trojan horse masquerading as a media file have been found on computers since Friday on services like Limewire and eDonkey.

Instead of playing an adult video, the Lion King in Portuguese, or the Girls Aloud theme from the St Trinnians soundtrack, for example, hundreds of rigged MP3 and MPEG files on the services trigger the download of an executable that serves ad to the infected computer.

Craig Schmugar, threat researcher at McAfee Avert Labs, explains in a blog entry that if people agree to download and run the executable they are asked to agree to a phony end user license agreement and some other useless software.

"In the end you're left with a fake MP3 file taking up space, a worthless MP3 player, adware that claims not only to not display popups, but also to block them, and more adware that successfully displays popup and popunder ads," Schmugar writes.

McAfee rates the threat "medium" risk, the highest rating given to any malware since 2005.

Update 7:57 AM PDT: Comcast and BitTorrent have made it official, announcing that they are working together "and with the broader Internet and ISP community" to address issues of rich media and network management. One specific result of the talks: Comcast says that, by the end of 2008, it will have adopted a "capacity management technique that is protocol agnostic."

Are Comcast and BitTorrent secretly an old married couple, prone to bickering over their peccadilloes and never quite comfortable together in public, but still joined tightly by an abiding sense of union and shared purpose?

So it would seem. The Wall Street Journal on Thursday reports a deal in the works between the cable provider and the file-sharing company that would have the pair collaborating on ways to make their technologies more compatible. Comcast, of course, has been on the hot seat in recent weeks over its practice of stymieing the peer-to-peer traffic of BitTorrent users.

Top executives at the two companies told the newspaper that Comcast will look for better ways to manage peak traffic on its network, slowing things down for those users who consume the most bandwidth, rather than by types of applications, such as BitTorrent. The new policy, which would also factor in additional data capacity, could take effect by the end of the year--if lab tests show it to be feasible.

The talks are also aimed at helping Comcast shore up video traffic on its network.

Public disputes aside, collaboration between the companies is nothing new, as CNET News.com's Marguerite Reardon reported recently. Her Q&A earlier this month with BitTorrent CEO Doug Walker, "BitTorrent to Comcast: Let's be friends," offers a wealth of detail and insight about the relationship, Comcast's issues with Internet video, and potential solutions.

"We have reached out to them. Actually, Tony Werner, who is the CTO of Comcast, is an adviser to BitTorrent," Walker told News.com. "And very few people know that."

Walker goes on: "We are continuing to have a dialogue. I am hopeful that we are going to be able to work together in the future as this whole thing works itself out and takes its natural course. If there is anyway we can help Comcast make its network more efficient, we'd like to be a part of that solution."

And that's in spite of the fact that the Q&A starts out with Walker saying that Comcast had unfairly singled out BitTorrent.

WASHINGTON--Congress must not interfere with Internet service providers that are trying to filter pirated content from their networks, a Republican politician said Wednesday.

Rep. Mary Bono Mack

(Credit: U.S. House of Representatives)

The recommendation from Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.) came in a steadfastly pro-copyright speech at an Internet policy conference here, during which she railed against what she described as rampant online piracy.

"I believe the best chance we have for achieving any success against digital piracy is to allow those entities and individuals who manage networks to have the flexibility and agility to take necessary and lawful steps to stop piracy online before it starts," said the widow of singer Sonny Bono, who recently took on the new last name when she married fellow Republican congressman Connie Mack of Florida. "The battle against digital piracy is a very fluid exercise. Network operators and digital-property owners should be free to experiment with and develop antipiracy technologies."

The congresswoman, who joked earlier in her speech that the Internet has revolutionized the way she shops, acknowledged that such a policy may not be popular among some "interest groups." But she suggested that if Congress stays out of the way and lets ISPs take steps to curb piracy, it might help copyright holders "recoup immense financial losses that piracy causes."

She did not suggest, however, that Congress should require Internet service providers to filter their networks, as Paul McGuinness, manager of the rock band U2, seemed to be saying in a speech earlier this week.

She also endorsed a bill pending in Congress, known as the PRO IP Act, which would significantly increase penalties for copyright infringers.

Bono Mack's comments arrived amid news that AT&T is testing technology designed to identify and police copyrighted material on its pipes. Federal regulators are also accepting comments on whether ISPs should be allowed to block or restrict peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic in the interest of "reasonable network management."

Bono Mack never addressed the idea that filtering technologies have been shown to be overinclusive or underinclusive, or that deep packet inspection by ISPs potentially raises privacy concerns.

She also never discussed the idea of fair use in her speech--that is, the idea that copyrighted material can be copied for education and research purposes. And when prodded by an audience member about her thoughts on the subject, she replied, "I believe the debate on fair use is still out there" before moving on to other topics. Contrary to "Internet myths," she added, she does not support "eternal copyright."

UPDATE: 7:12 A.M. (1-28-08): Qtrax continues to delay the launch of its much awaited legal file-sharing site as more record labels confirm that the startup doesn't have permission to sell their music.

For weeks, Qtrax, an ad-supported P2P site, had promised to offer free and legal music downloads from all four of the major record labels when it opened for business.

But despite earlier reports, Qtrax's Web site will apparently not feature legal downloads from any of the majors when it debuts. On the eve of the site's launch, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group said that Qtrax was not authorized to offer their music.

Both companies said they continue to negotiate with Qtrax, but emphasized that they don't have a done deal. A spokesman from Sony BMG echoed the other two companies by confirming on Monday morning that the label has not signed on to Qtrax either.

The Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday that New York-based Qtrax is also without a final agreement with the EMI Group. The blog, Silicon Alley Insider, was first to report on Qtrax's troubles.

Meanwhile, Qtrax has missed it's launch time of midnight Monday morning ET. More than eight hours later, visitors were still not allowed to download music. Robin Kent, a Qtrax marketing executive said that it might be another 24 hours before the company can enable downloads.

Qtrax CEO Allan Klepfisz acknowledged in an interview with CNET News.com late Sunday evening that his company may not possess agreements "written in stone," but that it doesn't mean Qtrax is without the labels' consent to feature their music.

"This is a tempest in a tea cup," Klepfisz said from the Midem music conference in Cannes, France. "It's true, some of the deals may not be locked in ink, but it's also true that we had understandings. In some cases, we had endorsements."

Klepfisz said it was likely the Qtrax Web site would debut featuring music from all four labels despite the public comments by UMG and Warner. Is he worried about a lawsuit?

"The answer is nobody has threatened us with a thing," Klepfisz said. "We plan to release music the way we said we were."

Qtrax's business model is based on offering people an attractive and legal file-sharing site.

The company's music offering sits on top of the Gnutella file-sharing network. Once a user downloads Qtrax's software client, they can look for songs with the help of the company's finger-printing technology.

Qtrax guarantees to protect customers from spyware or viruses that plague illegal sites. The way Qtrax makes money is by placing ads on its Web pages. The company then splits the ad revenue with the labels.

Recently, the labels have embraced ad-supported models. What they don't seem keen on are ad-supported sites that offer downloads.

For example, services such as Imeem and Last.fm, which stream music to listeners but don't allow them to download it to a computer or portable device, offer songs from all four top labels.

SpiralFrog, one of the best known services and one that enables people to download to a PC and some portable devices, has been toiling in the sector for nearly two years and has only managed to land one of the biggie labels: Universal Music Group.

An executive with the music industry's lobbying group engaged in a verbal sparring match on Thursday with the Washington Post columnist who alleges that the organization is trying to outlaw the practice of copying CDs to a computer.

National Public Radio hosted in on-air debate between Marc Fisher, the Post columnist, and Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The way I saw it, Fisher was ill advised to debate. What was exposed was a reporter who doesn't want to admit to making a mistake and has dug his heels in. Meanwhile, according to Sherman, Fisher has misled consumers.

Early in the debate, Fisher was on the defense as Sherman picked apart his story, which appeared on Sunday. In the piece Fisher quoted from a court document, filed in the case of an Arizona man accused by the RIAA of illegal file sharing. Fisher wrote that the quotes demonstrated that the lobbying group was now challenging the right of music fans to rip CDs to their computers.

Copying CDs to a computer or an iPod is common all over the world and if Fisher's claims were correct, the RIAA would be painting millions of people as criminals. The story became national news and scores of publications repeated Fisher's claims.

But as numerous bloggers and copyright experts have noted, the quotes cited by Fisher are incomplete. Fisher wrote that the RIAA had argued in the brief that MP3 files created from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" and violate the law.

"The Post picked up one sentence in a 21-page brief and then picked the part of the sentence about ripping CDs onto the computer," Sherman said during the radio show. "(The Post) simply ignored the part of the sentence about putting them into a shared folder."

The "shared folder" omission is at the center of what's wrong with Fisher's story. Anyone who reads the brief can see that the RIAA says over and over again what it considers to be illegal activity: the distribution of music files via peer-to-peer networks.

Fisher didn't address this issue during the debate. Instead he moved on to testimony given by Jennifer Pariser, a Sony BMG lawyer, who said during an earlier court case: "when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song."

This is when Sherman really went to work on Fisher's story.

"The Sony person who (Fisher) relies on actually misspoke in that trial," Sherman said. "I know because I asked her after stories started appearing. It turns out that she had misheard the question. She thought that this was a question about illegal downloading when it was actually a question about ripping CDs. That is not the position of Sony BMG. That is not the position of that spokesperson. That is not the position of the industry."

Sherman said that other reporters and bloggers had called about Pariser's quotes and chose not to write about them after learning she had erred.

Why wasn't Fisher offered this information? Well, he would have been had he spoken to anyone at the RIAA, Sherman said.

Prior to writing the story Fisher called the RIAA for a statement once and left a message, according to Sherman. When the RIAA's spokesman returned the call two hours later, he missed Fisher. But Fisher never called back to get the RIAA's statement even though the story wasn't published until nine days later.

It's customary for journalists to give the subject of a story a chance to be quoted--especially when they're slamming them.

Again, Fisher declined to address Sherman's accusations. He moved on to statements that appear on the RIAA's Web site, which he claims show that the group considers copying music to a computer as unlawful.

But Sherman suggested that Fisher was once again being selective with the RIAA's statements. Sherman showed the location on the site where the RIAA says that people can typically copy music for personal use without any problems.

"They go on to equivocate and say, 'Well, usually it won't raise concerns if you go ahead and transfer legally obtained music to your computer,'" Fisher said during the debate, "but they won't go all the way and say that it's a legal right."

Here was an opportunity for Sherman to declare once and for all that copying CDs for personal use is lawful. He stopped short of that, saying that copyright law is too complex to make such sweeping statements. He did state that there is one foolproof way of discovering the RIAA's policy on personal use: check the record.

"Not a single (legal) case has ever been brought (by the RIAA against someone for copying music for personal use)," Sherman said. "Not a single claim has ever been made."

In the final analysis, this is really a story about journalism ethics more than it is about technology. Fisher is a respected journalist who probably should remember one of the first things they teach cub reporters: when someone challenges you over a story, it's smart to think of worst-case scenarios.

Reporters are reminded to ask themselves whether they could defend everything they did during the reporting and writing process if ever sued? If the RIAA ever took the Post to court over the issue, Fisher might have to explain why he omitted important sections of the RIAA's legal brief. He would have to justify not trying harder to get RIAA comment.

If a reporter's work doesn't stand up, the typical remedy at most media organizations is to issue a correction. That's what the Post should do in this case.

Greg Sandoval is a former Washington Post staff writer.

It's late on Wednesday evening and the Washington Post has yet to correct a story that accused the recording industry of trying to paint law-abiding music fans as criminals.

But the paper should make things right and soon.

Marc Fisher, a Post columnist, wrote on Sunday that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) asserted in a legal brief that anyone who copies music from a CD onto their computer is a thief. The document, filed last month, was part of the RIAA's copyright suit against Jeffrey Howell, an Arizona resident accused of illegal file sharing.

Quoting from the brief, Fisher wrote that the RIAA had argued that MP3 files created from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" and violate the law. If it were true, the move would represent a major shift in strategy by the RIAA, which typically hasn't challenged an individual's right to copy CDs for personal use.

The problem with Fisher's story is that nowhere in the RIAA's brief does the group call someone a criminal for simply copying music to a computer. Throughout the 21-page brief, the recording industry defines what it considers to be illegal behavior and it boils down to this: creating digital recordings from CDs and then uploading them to file-sharing networks.

A sentence on page 15 of the brief clearly spells out the RIAA's position: "Once (Howell) converted plaintiff's recording into the compressed MP3 format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies distributed by Plaintiff."

The key words there are "shared folder" and it's an important distinction. It means that before the RIAA considers someone a criminal, a person has to at least appear to be distributing music.

The Post story, which followed similar pieces in Ars Technica and Wired.com, has spurred scores of other media outlets to repeat the paper's erroneous assertion. Ironically, even typically anti-RIAA blogs, such as Engadget, Gizmodo and TechDirt have jumped in on the side of the RIAA.

"The Washington Post story is wrong," said Jonathan Lamy, an RIAA spokesman. "As numerous commentators have since discovered after taking the time to read our brief, the record companies did not allege that ripping a lawfully acquired CD to a computer or transferring a copy to an MP3 player is infringement. This case is about the illegal distribution of copyrighted songs on a peer-to-peer network, not making copies of legally acquired music for personal use."

After reading Lamy's statement, Fisher didn't back down.

He responded in an e-mail to CNET News.com: "The bottom line is that there is a disconnect between RIAA's publicly stated policy that making a personal copy of a CD is ok and the theory advanced by its lawyers that in fact, transferring music to your computer is an unauthorized act."

He took one more shot before signing off: "Rather than suing its customers and slamming reporters, the RIAA might better spend its energies focusing on winning back the trust of an alienated consumer base."

Still, Fisher received little support from respected and independent copyright experts. William Patry, the copyright guru at Google--not exactly known as a lackey for copyright holders--wrote on his blog that the RIAA is being "unfairly maligned" in the Post story.

Patry does, however, caution that recent statements made by the RIAA and included in Fisher's story reflect the group's growing tendency to use language as a means of control.

Fisher quoted Sony BMG's chief of litigation, Jennifer Pariser, who testified recently in court that "when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song."

Patry disagreed.

"This new rhetoric of 'everything anyone does without (RIAA) permission is stealing' is well worth noting and well worth challenging at every occasion," Patry wrote. "It is the rhetoric of copyright as an ancient property right, permitting copyright owners to control all uses as a natural right; the converse is that everyone else is an immoral thief."

Greg Sandoval is a former Washington Post staff writer.

The RIAA's justification for its strong-arm tactics against alleged file sharers is simple: file sharing acts as a substitute for music purchases and is directly and primarily responsible for plummetting CD sales (which are down 14 percent from last year). I've argued in the past that the entire drop can't be blamed on piracy, and one Harvard study suggested that piracy is having no effect at all.

This week, Billboard published an article about a study commissioned by the Canadian government that investigated the connection between file sharing and CD sales. The surprising conclusion: the most active file traders on P2P networks actually buy more CDs than their less active counterparts. This seems to suggest that the recording industry should abandon its crackdown and embrace P2P networks.

But wait: economist Stanley Leibowitz at the University of Texas, Dallas, has posted a well-reasoned critique of the Canadians' methodology. Essentially, the more active file sharers are the same people who are most interested in music, and therefore the most likely to be buying large volumes of CDs. So, of course you'll see an increase in both measurements--CD purchases and file-trading activity--simultaneously among the same users. To correct for this "simultaneity effect," you have to measure the overall volume of file sharing over time across all types of users--casual to extreme music fans--and compare it with CD sales over the same period. If you do that, Leibowitz claims, you'll see a direct correlation between file sharing and reduced CD sales.

Another problem that seems obvious to me: by focusing on P2P networks, these studies (and the RIAA) ignore other types of file sharing that I think are much more prevalent, such as burned CDs and flash drives. Ten years ago, very few CD collections included music recorded on CD-Rs. Today, almost every collection does.

Also, these studies strike me a bit like investigating why the horse escaped and arguing whether it's because somebody left the barn door open by accident or on purpose. The industry knows its predicament--it's very easy for customers to get recorded music for free. The interesting question is how (and whether) they can adjust their business models to stay viable and relevant under these new conditions.