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File sharing has a new face on college campuses and other networked environments – Direct Connect. Due to selective pressure from lawyers representing the entertainment industry, file sharing programs have continually improved and become more efficient to avoid legal problems.

Direct Connect succeeds because it does what its name implies – it sets up a direct connection from one user to another. These two users simply share each other’s “backups” of movies, games and programs. You can even instant message the person you are downloading from, or any other user. And yet this probably doesn’t mean anything new for the entertainment industry.

A hub is a self-contained unit that a group of people dial into. Think of it as a kind of elite Kazaa. But, instead of being connected to the entire world as on Kazaa, you are connecting only to the members of a certain hub. The hub administrators can set rules for their hub.

On the UCLA hub, you have to share at least 2 gigabytes of files to enter and there are restrictions on things like viruses. The best part about DC is since only the people on a certain network connect to the hub, the users enjoy vastly superior download speeds when compared to programs like Kazaa, which are bandwidth limited.

Up until now, I haven’t even mentioned the legality of Direct Connect. As I understand it, fair usage laws allow people to make backups of their programs, music, movies, and even software as long as they are not distributed for profit. But if I have a collection of movies and programs on my computer and I share them with another person, I’m sure that the entertainment industry could portray this sharing in a negative light.

So what do we do? We (the collective we) hit the entertainment industry where it hurts the most …

The Academy Awards is a wonderful annual event that gives recognition to achievements in the film industry. Whoopee. What concerns me is for the academy to choose the winners, all of the nominated movies are sent out on DVD in a great big package, probably inconspicuously labeled “this side up” or “do not copy these unreleased movies onto your computer and share them on the Internet.”

Inevitably somebody got a hold of these DVDs and compressed them to the Divx and Xvid formats for easy sharing. Later, they popped up on DC as “DVD-Screener-Divx” or the like. Now, like something out of “American Idol,” the masses can join the Academy and screen all of the nominees!

I predict the Academy is going to adjust its practice of sending out DVD screeners and instead implement a high-tech method of securely streaming the movies. I also predict that the newly secure screeners will be intercepted and show up on file sharing programs anyway.

That said, the type of people who download movies off of DC go through the effort of finding the right codec and probably have a large DVD collection anyway. For them, downloading screeners wouldn’t effect whether or not they bought the DVD. In other words, most people would download and watch movies they otherwise wouldn’t have bought (thus no loss to the entertainment industry); and they will download the movies they really love because they can’t wait to watch them, and then they will still buy the DVDs when they come out.

The biggest error that the entertainment industry makes is assuming that a song or movie that was downloaded is a lost sale.

E-mail Esposito at resposito@media.ucla.edu.