Alligator Online

UF's homegrown network-monitoring software has become a point of contention for students who say the program prevents them from legal downloading activities and infringes on their rights.

ICARUS, which is largely responsible for the prevention of peer-to-peer software usage on campus, has outraged a number of students who claim it violates their rights.

But despite protest, the patent-pending program may soon be available to universities nationwide.

In creating ICARUS, UF's initial inclination was to develop a program that would solve network congestion, said Mark Hoit, the interim associate provost for information technology.

"Based on that bandwith needed, we looked at the Web traffic and determined that a lot of it was due to illegal file sharing," Hoit said. "It was more cost effective to limit students from downloading things they shouldn't be downloading."

Materials science and engineering student Zachary Harper said his biggest problem with ICARUS is that the software doesn't discriminate between copyright infringement and fair use.

Harper, who is part of the facebook.com group STOP ICARUS, said he feels UF should permit the usage of legal peer-to-peer, or P2P, file-sharing programs like BitTorrent.

BitTorrent, an open-source file-sharing program, is used by legitimate enterprises to distribute computer-game demos, open-source operating systems, such as Linux, and other free software.

However, ICARUS was designed simply to monitor the network, not filter the actual content, Hoit said. Therefore, it is impossible for ICARUS to determine whether BitTorrent is being used for legitimate or infringing purposes.

That imprecision of ICARUS is precisely the problem, said Nicholas Stack, a pre-law and philosophy senior.

Stack, also a member of STOP ICARUS, said one of his issues with the program is that it detects a violation and cuts off the person's Internet connection automatically, without determining the legitimacy of P2P usage.

Stack said he feels this is a violation of the Student Code of Conduct.

He said his biggest issue with ICARUS is if a student is caught sharing files, even for legitimate purposes, the student is required to visit the DHNet Web site and sign an online form with his UFID and admit to doing something wrong, thus incriminating themselves without a hearing.

"I understand what they're trying to do, but it just seems like they're violating the Student Code of Conduct," Stack said.