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After months of rumours of piracy on the Internet global communications
network, the US attorney in Boston this month brought charges against David
LaMacchia, a 20-year-old student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
alleging conspiracy to commit ‘wire fraud’. LaMacchia is accused of using
two of the university’s workstations to distribute commercial software worth
more than a million dollars.

The Software Publishers Association says it applauds the action, but
many of those who use the Internet feel criminal charges are excessive.
LaMacchia’s lawyers claim that the law on wire fraud, which was designed
to prevent the use of telephone wires in interstate fraud schemes, does
not apply in LaMacchia’s case.

The case raises important legal issues because US law does not explicitly
ban what LaMacchia is accused of doing. He set up two of MIT’s workstations
to function as ‘bulletin board’ servers, storing computer files and messages
sent electronically, through the Internet, and making them available to
other people. Government lawyers say LaMacchia encouraged others to copy
commercial software onto his server, and to make copies of software stored
there. They say this was a criminal conspiracy to violate the 1952 federal
wire fraud law. Pirate bulletin boards on other networks have been shut
down because the operators profited or copied software themselves, but this
is the first charge of piracy on the Internet.

This case raises the key issues of who should police electronic networks,
and who is responsible for illegal acts that involve such networks. The
government lawyers argue that the ‘system operator’ for each computer is
responsible, and must answer to law enforcement agencies for any breaches
of the law. In this case the operator was LaMacchia.

LaMacchia’s lawyers say that other media are not subject to such strict
standards. ‘One example is a public library with Xerox machines,’ says David
Duncan of Zalkind, Rodrigues, Lunt & Duncan, a Boston law firm. ‘It
doesn’t take much to imagine users are violating copyrights.’

The federal indictment claims that LaMacchia using the aliases John
Gaunt or Grimjack, asked other Internet users to transfer software to the
bulletin board he had set up. It cites one message from ‘gaunt’ that read:
‘If anyone has this stuff, I’d appreciate it. Sim City 2000, Excel 5.0 (Windoze)
WordPerfect 6.0 (Windoze).’

MIT officials say that LaMacchia reprogrammed two workstations in a
group reserved for general student use, breaking the institute’s own rules.
According to MIT, many requests to and from the illicit servers were ‘sent
via Finnish nodes, which forwarded them anonymously’, as is allowed by
Finnish law. Replies were forwarded by the computer in Finland, so the
pirates remained anonymous.

The Software Publishers Association called the case ‘flagrant’. But
others think the charges are overblown. ‘This is an overzealous prosecution
by techno-illiterate law enforcement,’ says Jim Thomas, professor of criminology
at Northern Illinois University, who has studied computer piracy. He points
out that LaMacchia had only 200 megabytes of storage space, too little to
hold many programs, and small compared to the 1000 megabytes typical of
‘a decent pirate board’. ‘If this happened here,’ he says, ‘I would nail
the student, read him the riot act, and invoke university disciplinary procedures.’

MIT says it called in the FBI because the case ‘involved things beyond
the campus’. A spokesman declined to elaborate because of the pending criminal
case. A student apparently noticed sounds coming from a supposedly idle
computer and alerted the network manager. He notified the campus police,
who in turn contacted the FBI. While MIT denies it is worried about its
liability, some observers speculate that the university may have been intimidated
by the aggressive antipiracy campaigns of the Software Publishers Association.