E-Mail This Article to a Friend FILE-SHARING Former Harvard prof cracks down on student file-sharers BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

Eight months ago, Dan Glickman was teaching Harvard students; now, he is suing them. After three years as director of the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government, Glickman left last September to become president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), where he heads the major film studios’ quest to end movie piracy. This Tuesday, his new role led him to announce federal lawsuits against students at colleges nationwide, whom he accuses of illegally sharing digital copies of movies across the Internet.

Or, more specifically, across Internet2, an advanced network project used by 200 universities and research institutions, which has drawn the MPAA’s ire. Until recently, these types of file-sharing lawsuits came mostly from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Copying a movie over the Internet can take hours, even with a good connection, so it’s been a relatively small problem compared with the rapid-fire pace of song downloading.

But users of Internet2’s i2hub file-sharing application can download a full-length, DVD-quality movie in less than five minutes — a harbinger of what will one day be available to the general public. "What’s going on with Internet2 is a preview of what will happen on the commercial Internet," says Lauren Kallens, spokesperson for the Internet2 consortium, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

So this week, when RIAA announced 405 lawsuits against Internet2 users — disproportionately hitting the Boston area, with 11 at Harvard, 22 at MIT, and 25 each at Boston University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst — Glickman joined in with an unspecified number of similar lawsuits from the MPAA. College students swapping movies on i2hub "are Internet thieves ... with no regard to the law," Glickman said in a prepared statement. "Our message to these thieves is clear — you are not anonymous, and you will be held responsible. You can click but you cannot hide."

Actually, at the moment the scofflaws are anonymous, even to themselves — these are "John Doe" suits, listing only Internet-protocol (IP) addresses. The RIAA and MPAA plan to subpoena the schools for the names. "We will not be releasing the names and numbers [publicly], but we will follow any subpoenas we receive," says Harvard spokesperson Joe Wrinn.

University administrators and Internet2 staff want to help stop illegal Internet2 use, Kallens says — but they also want to ensure that filters and firewalls don’t hamper the network’s users. "We need the high bandwidth to facilitate this kind of advanced technology research," she says.

Unknown is how RIAA and MPAA tracked i2hub activity in the first place. With Internet file-sharing services such as Kazaa, RIAA sleuths simply got their own accounts, looked into other users’ public files, copied IP addresses of those with huge lists of copyrighted files, and subpoenaed the Internet-service provider for the user’s identity. But only consortium members can access the Internet2 network — and RIAA and MPAA do not have access, says Internet2’s Kallens. The RIAA and MPAA are mum on the question. "We do not comment on our investigative process," says RIAA spokesperson Jenni Engebretsen.