MIT Student Indicted on Piracy Charges

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Student Indicted on Piracy Charges

By Josh Hartmann
Contributing Editor

A federal grand jury charged an MIT student yesterday on a felony charge for
allegedly allowing the piracy of over $1 million in business and entertainment
software using Athena workstations.

David M. LaMacchia '95 was indicted on one count of conspiring to commit wire
fraud, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney's office in Boston.
LaMacchia allegedly allowed the duplication of hundreds of copyrighted software
packages between Nov. 21, 1993, and Jan. 5, 1994, using workstations on the
Athena Computing Environment.

"We became aware sometime in December that a computer was being used to
distribute software," said Kenneth D. Campbell, director of the news office.
"That information was turned over to Campus Police and the FBI. MIT personnel
cooperated with the FBI in the investigation."

The incident was discovered when an Athena-user in the Student Center cluster
noticed that an unattended workstation next to him was behaving abnormally,
making frequent disk accesses, according to James D. Bruce ScD '60, vice
president for Information Systems.

The user apparently reported the abnormal behavior to members of the Student
Information Processing Board, who then proceeded to investigate the matter,
according to a source familiar with the investigation. The SIPB members saw the
status of the workstation and reported the incident to the Information Systems
staff, the source said.

SIPB itself was not part of the investigation, according to Jessie
Stickgold-Sarah '96, the SIPB chairman.

Attorneys for LaMacchia issued a swift denial of the charges late yesterday,
saying LaMacchia was merely the provider of a service which others used to
place and remove files. The statement called the indictment a test case to
"decide whether current criminal law would penalize a [systems operator] who
neither controls what is placed on the system nor profits one cent from any
copyrighted software that others upload to and download from the system that
he and others create and operate."

Many of the people who accessed the pirated files over the Internet concealed
their location by using an anonymous service in Finland, Bruce said.

The Associated Press reported yesterday that LaMacchia advertised the server
strictly by word-of-mouth to avoid detection. The AP quoted the indictment as
saying that as many as 180 users accessed the server in one 16-hour period.

Disciplinary process underway

Within MIT, "there was a disciplinary action filed against [LaMacchia]
sometime in January," Bruce said. These proceedings have been halted, he added.

Another anonymous source said that the Office of the Dean for Undergraduate
Education and Student Affairs had received a complaint in January, but had not
decided whether the disciplinary action would be forwarded to the Committee on
Discipline, handled by the Dean's Office, or dismissed outright.

Dean for Undergraduate Education and Student Affairs Arthur C. Smith said last
night that Institute disciplinary procedures are usually suspended when a
student is charged with such a crime. However, Smith would not comment on the
status of any disciplinary case underway. If LaMacchia were convicted, he
would still be subject to the normal disciplinary measures within the
Institute, Smith said.

Losses over $1 million

Losses from the illegal software duplication are expected to surpass
$1 million, according to the statement from the U.S. Attorney's office.

"The pirating of business and entertainment software through clandestine
computer bulletin boards is tremendously costly to software companies, and by
extension to their employees and to the economy," said U.S. Attorney
Donald K. Stern. "We need to respond to the culture that no one is hurt by
these thefts and that there is nothing wrong with pirating software."

A list obtained by The Tech revealed that MS-DOS games dominated the server.
Among the business software, however, were Aldus Pagemaker 5.0 for Windows,
Microsoft Word for Windows 6.0, a beta (pre-release) copy of a forthcoming
operating system by Microsoft code-named Chicago, WordPerfect 6.0 for both DOS
and Windows, a beta copy of Microsoft 5.0, and Aldus PhotoStyler 2.0.

If found guilty LaMacchia could conceivably be the subject of a civil suit by
the software vendors, Bruce said. "It would be entirely possible for a vendor
to make a case that it suffered monetary damages," he said. "I would think
there is some reason [LaMacchia] could be sued."

Bruce said he thought the Institute's liability would be limited because of
Athena rules prohibiting duplication of copyrighted software.

LaMacchia did not return telephone calls last night.

Copyright 1994 by The Tech. All rights reserved.
This story was published on Friday, April 8, 1994.
Volume 114, Number 19
The story began on page 1 and jumped to page 13.
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