Important Canadian musicians including Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan and Chantal Kreviazuk have banded together in a new group Called the Canadian Music Creators Coalition to fight against p2p lawsuits, statutory damages, DRM and anti-circumvention legislation.
Among other things, “Fans who share music are not thieves or pirates,” they state flatly. “Sharing music has been happening for decades.”
But the University of Texas’ information technology services told computer science sophomore Chet Wynn, head administrator of the DC++ hub for on-campus file-sharing, to shut the hub down.

“The hub based on campus was exclusively for students and allowed files to be transferred at the speed of the University’s internal network without taking up any student bandwidth,” says The Daily Texan. “According to an e-mail that Wynn received, he was not penalized for copyright infringement,” says the story. He was punished for ‘commercial use of University IT resources.’ He included a PayPal link on the hub page for donations.
Vice-president Daniel Updegrove is quoted as stating, “What I’m not saying is that we have direct evidence that DC++ was used for copyright infringement. What I do know is that if you search the Internet for DC++, you can see that if is often used to facilitate copyright infringement.”
Updegrove said he wasn’t aware of any RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) or MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) complaints related to the hub’s closure.
“To the administrators and the founder of the program, the UT DC++ hub was more than a place to share files,” the story adds.
“The administrators became friends with many of the hub’s users. They even met to eat dinner at Jester several nights a week.”
Updegrove may protest the entertainment cartels weren’t behind the forced DC++ take-down, but p2pnet has been told in Norway, “with the MPAA’s MPA up front,” the Big Four record labels and Big Six studios, “are about to ramp up their efforts,” probably using DC++ as their focal point”.