The Chronicle for Higher Education has a report today about the “Digital Citizen Project,” at Illinois State, which has catalogued all of the network use of their students and then gathered from it data about peer-to-peer file-trading activity, scrubbed of identifying data. The project and much of its findings are available here.

There are all sorts of concerns here, about the privacy of the students, about what this data will suggest to university administrators and to the RIAA, which helped sponsor the research. But I think the Chronicle rightly highlights how this work is bound up by the ongoing tension between publishers and content industries on the one hand, and universities on the other. It is clear from the report that Illinois State initiated this project in part to help protect their students from lawsuits, and in fact negotiated with the RIAA that, in exchange for this data, their students would (to an unspecified degree) be immune from lawsuits. They also pointed out that, while the main point of the data is that there is a whole lot of file-trading going on, and much of it is moving files from on to off campus, they also looked at how successful and “anti-piracy” tool like CopySense is in spotting these transactions: the answer, not very. CopySense apparently depends on the files being traded having copyright information in their metadata, which apparently only 2.9% of the files traded did. So the threat from Sen. Reid to insert language into the renewal of the Higher Education Act that universities be required to install such anti-piracy mechanisms, is a pretty empty gesture.