Messaging News - December 2008 - (Page 23) Kenneth C. Green, founding director of CCP, the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA) signed by President Bush in August as the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 imposes “hundreds of new reporting requirements that govern the activities of the nation’s 4,400 public, private, and for-profit twoand four-year colleges and universities.” Green says that buried deep in the 1,158 pages of the HEA legislation, in Section 488, are three new regulations intended to force colleges and universities to address the issue of illegal P2P file sharing of digital content—primarily music and movies. The key P2P provisions, says Green, require campuses: “to make an annual disclosure that informs students that the illegal distribution of copyrighted materials may subject them to criminal and civic penalties, and to certify to the Secretary of Education quoted and frequently cited commissioned study had “incorrectly concluded that 44 percent of the motion picture industry’s domestic losses were attributable to piracy by college students.” In addition, the association projected that its “…2007 study will report that number to be approximately 15 percent.” According to Green, the MPAA attributed the bad data in 2005 to an isolated error. Green contends that it is now and always has been consumers at large, not students that are the primary source of P2P piracy. From Personal Habits to Business Habits While there has been much generalizing of Gen Y traits and risky online behavior, the truth is Gen Y is not the only group embracing the latest technology, especially when it comes to messaging in the workplace. Gen X and Boomers are also responsible for • Web conferencing is now used by 82 percent of employees, up from 72 percent last year. • In addition to penetrating across all organizations, according to IT managers, in two-thirds of organizations, eight or more of these applications are in use. That represents 300 percent growth since 2005, the first year of the tracking study. • On average, an organization has 9.3 of these types of Internet applications in use by its employees. The study also found that streaming media and file sharing is higher at smaller companies, and that collaborative work application usage increases by company size with larger companies most likely to use them. Another recent review of P2P, this one by MultiMedia Intelligence, predicts that P2P Internet traffic, despite having grown at a torrid pace for years, will grow almost 400 percent over the next five years. Growing from a level of 1.6 petabytes of Internet traffic per month in 2007, P2P Internet traffic will grow to almost 8 petabytes per month by 2012. “Despite the prevailing the Workforce that (the institution) has developed plans to ‘effectively combat’ the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material.” Green notes that while the plan is to be developed, no mandate is in effect to collect the plans or have them approved. “The language explicitly notes that institutions are not required to adopt any particular type of technology-based deterrent, recognizing that even institutions that ‘prohibit content monitoring’ retain the authority to determine their own plans.” Green points out that “unlike the employees of large technology firms who have broadband access at work but whose employers can monitor their online activities, colleges and universities generally impose far fewer restrictions of the personal use of Internet resources than corporations and government agencies.” On the heels of the recent legislation that will force campuses to respond with potentially costly compliance plans, comes information that Gen Y’s use of P2P to illegally access data appears to have been exaggerated. A year ago the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said in a statement that its 2005 much the infiltration of potentially unsanctioned technology. In September, data was collected in a survey of more than 500 employees and IT managers to determine the impact of PC applications, Web sites and social networking services. These included real-time consumer applications (e.g. instant messaging, P2P, VoIP) that “are often introduced by individual end-users and use highly evasive techniques to traverse the network. In addition they include a wide variety of Web 2.0 applications used by end-users at work, ranging from file sharing to collaborative work apps— but also social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.” According to FaceTime, who commissioned NewDiligence to conduct the survey, these applications are the source of both real and potential risk to corporations because they provide vectors for malware, intellectual property loss, compliance risk and decreased employee productivity. The NewDiligence survey found Internet application usage has expanded dramatically with Web conferencing, streaming audio and Web-based email to be the top applications in use. The study shows: messagingnews.com 23 http://www.messagingnews.com
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