To all university students and administration:

As many of you know, MP3 use among college students has been quite an issue during the last year and a half. One of the main reasons MP3 use has been an issue is because of the use of university bandwidth. The Students Against University Censorship (SAUC) sees this bandwidth issue as a legitimate problem, yet we disagree with the methods that the various universities have chosen to use in order to handle their problem. Instead of the universities (all universities excluding Oregon State) informing their students about the bandwidth problem and trying to inform/ educate students on how to properly and responsibly use Napster, the universities chose to keep the matter silent. Over the months of realizing that they had a bandwidth problem on their hands, various universities started banning the use of Napster via a firewall, therefore blocking access to the website and MP3 client.

Oregon State tried to inform students of the bandwidth problem, as well as tried to teach the students how to responsibly and properly use Napster. However, the students did not listen, and therefore Oregon State had no choice but to ban Napster from it's university network via a firewall. In this case, SAUC respects the effort put forth by Oregon State to inform and educate their students before they were forced to ban Napster from it's network. However, we do hope that they will put forth a bit more effort soon by having a town meeting to give the students their voice on the matter, as UCS successfully did. Case in point, universities need to educate and inform students of a problem before taking away a powerful media source like Napster.

The grassroots efforts of Students Against University Censorship (SAUC) put us directly in touch with our membership and voting constituency. All of our outreach, issue education, signature gathering and membership drives are conducted by this lobbying arm. We lobby on behalf of independent artists, media companies such as Napster, and most importantly the students against censorship legislation. SAUC serves as a liaison between these groups and works to create relationships for better lines of communication between university students and administration around the nation.

By simply banning every media-sharing program that consumes a significant amount of their bandwidth, universities are setting themselves up for a major problem. Already, many students have tried to rebel by setting up and sharing proxy servers. Proxy servers are servers set up by individuals that allow access to internet resources. The intent of a proxy server in this case is used to bypass the university firewall; thereby giving the user access to anything that is banned on the network. This is not the only problem that the universities are facing by banning media sharing software. Other media sharing software companies will start popping up. As each pops up, draining more and more of the universities bandwidth, the more the university will block. It is a vicious cycle. Now, compound that with the proxy servers mentioned earlier and you have a big mess that will cost the universities a lot of money and resources. Please note that SAUC is against copyright violation as well as the use of proxy servers. We rather fight and lobby against the universities decisions on banning internet resources, then to unlawfully choose to take the easy way out, and we hope that you will fight with us.

Our proposed solution to this issue is very simple and should be easy for institutions of higher learning to digest. Simply educate and inform students that leaving Napster running all day (which is one of the biggest reasons that it is eating up university bandwidth) is not something that will be tolerated. Educate students and inform them that even though they have access to a high-speed ethernet connection, there are also limits involved. Inform your students what the definitions of key terms like bandwidth, network resources, copyright violation, and music piracy should mean to them. After educating students that Napster is not a free for all forum of illegal MP3 trading, and that the students should respectfully and responsibly use it, they should lift the ban on Napster and all other related media sharing utilities. They can choose to uplift the ban on a limited basis so they can closely monitor the remaining irresponsible students that choose to abuse the network. After the universities identify the few remaining abusers of network resources, action should be taken against the offenders. All in all, students who abuse the network should be responsible for doing so. Napster, the other law-abiding students who use Napster, and the uneducated students that don't realize the limits of the universities network should not be penalized.

Respectfully