Robert Barker/University Photography

Fred von Lohmann, right, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, makes a point during "The Download Debate Strikes Back" forum, April 14 in Kennedy Hall. Flanking him on the left is Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, and Avery Kotler '95, senior director of business and legal affairs for Napster.

ITHACA, N.Y. -- A group of experts on peer-to-peer file sharing managed to agree on one thing last night: that having people obtain intellectual property without compensating the creators is not a good thing. But they came nowhere near to agreeing on a solution to the problem.

The occasion was a panel discussion, "The Download Debate Strikes Back," organized by the Cornell Student Assembly, the University Computer Policy and Law Program and the Office of the Dean of Students, which brought together representatives of the music and movie industries and critics of their current approaches to digital downloading. Most of what they said has been heard before, but the often-spirited exchange was, as one audience member said, "tremendously amusing."

Panelists were Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America; Fritz Attaway, executive vice president of the Motion Picture Association of America; Siva Vaidhyanathan, New York University assistant professor of media studies; Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); Alec French, senior counsel for NBC/Universal and former minority counsel for the U.S. House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property; and Avery Kotler '95, senior director of business and legal affairs for Napster. It was, organizers said, the first time such a group had been brought together on one stage in many months. Kent Hubbell, the Robert W. and Elizabeth C. Staley Dean of Students, moderated the discussion.

The industry representatives repeated a familiar litany: that file sharing without paying is stealing, both illegal and immoral, and that if songwriters, performers and filmmakers are not compensated, no more music and films will be created. They justified their attacks on file-sharing systems as "incentives," although most would be better described as "disincentives."

The discussion opened under a sort of cloud, since it had been announced only the day before that copyright infringement lawsuits would be filed against more than 400 students at 18 colleges for illegal file sharing over Internet2, a high-speed network used primarily for scientific communication. Meanwhile, a suit against Grokster and other companies that provide peer-to-peer services is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The audience of about 70 people -- mostly students -- responded to the industry representatives with polite applause but responded enthusiastically to von Lohmann, who argued that the industry is approaching the problem from the wrong direction, "trying to destroy the technology and attacking the end users."

He repeated an also-familiar line of argument: that the entertainment industry has vehemently opposed almost every new technology, from radio and the phonograph to video recording, but eventually has embraced each new medium and derived huge profits from it. "What we should have been focusing on for the last five years," he said, "is finding the last piece of the technology: compensation." He suggested a system similar to the one now used to compensate songwriters, in which private societies like ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) collect blanket fees from broadcasters and distribute the money to members.

Vaidhyanathan chided the industry for ignoring reality: that file sharing is not going away. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, he said, was the greatest failure in history. It has made consumers unhappy but hasn't stopped piracy at all. "Seven years later, what can't you get?" he inquired.

In later discussion, von Lohmann applied the same criticism to digital rights management (DRM) technology, which places flags in digital files that limit the user's ability to copy them. "DRM is not preventing piracy," he said. "It's just irritating people who use it."

Kotler found himself in the middle, both literally on stage and philosophically. Napster, he pointed out, is doing the sort of thing von Lohmann was advocating, charging users a fee and paying copyright owners for the rights to distribute songs, despite the industry claim that having everything available for free would make such a business model impossible. The solution, he suggested, was to offer a better-quality product with additional features.

Questioners from the audience generally agreed that they would be willing to pay for what they got but also chided the industry for refusing to face the reality that digital file sharing is not going to go away, and for the inconvenience created by DRMs. "Every one of these mistakes is a reason to use KaZaa instead," one said. KaZaa is a popular file-sharing system.

Most agreed with von Lohmann and urged the industry to embrace the technology and learn to use it, to get to a position where, as one student said, "The more people download, the more the industry would make."

Ironically, a digital video file of the entire forum is available for free streaming at http://www.cit.cornell.edu/oit/UCPL.html .