Hundreds of Wesleyan students type his name into their search engines daily. But a scant few, it seems, know his first name, much less that he wears a fedora. Here, Brendan Dolan-Gavitt ’06, creator of the network search engine, puts a face to his name as he talks about the government’s crackdown on piracy and why you won’t see the network disappear anytime soon.
DW: So where did you get the idea for the network?
BDG: The network itself is just everyone’s computers. I didn’t create it. I just provide a list of what’s on it. But as for the idea, my freshman year one of my friends and I were talking about how this kind of thing existed at other schools and he said, ‘Why don’t we have one?’ So I sat down one weekend and designed the basic program and then I refined it over winter break. By the next spring people were starting to find out about it, which is weird because we didn’t really advertise it at all.
DW: And now everyone knows it. It’s funny, though. Katey [Rich ’06, Executive Editor] didn’t know your first name was Brendan.
BDG: That’s it. I wanted people to finally know how to spell my name. Actually, though. I don’t know if people know bdolangavitt is a name.
DW: So I guess if they don’t even know it’s a name you probably don’t get approached very much by other students.
BDG: I’ve only been approached randomly a few times, and that was back when I had a picture on Facebook. They’re always like, “Oh, you’re that guy!”
DW: When I had my computer fixed in the computer store last year the technician warned me not to use the network but then he said he uses it all the time himself.
BDG: Oh, the guys in the store love it. And apparently a large portion of ITS uses it, too. Occasionally, Alan at the store will even ask me to add things to it.
DW: Tell me about The New York Times article that you were featured in.
BDG: Midway through freshman year several sites at other schools got shut down. I know Harvard, RPI, and maybe one other school had one. I thought it was a bit ludicrous. There’s nothing wrong with providing a way for people to find files on a network. I decided to keep it on line. Some people, like the reporter from The New York Times, realized I was keeping it up and contacted me. She [the reporter] called up and asked if we could arrange an interview. We talked about a lot of the things that we’re talking about now.
DW: Why do you think you haven’t been sued?
BDG: I think that their [the federal government’s] main strategy is to go after people they don’t think are able or willing to fight back. By keeping it up I indicated I wasn’t going to roll over. A guy in California who does a lot of pro-bono legal work said I should contact him if I got into any trouble. So that’s comforting.
DW: What do you think about the University’s decision to offer trials of Ruckus to students?
BDG: I think it’s Sony offering free trials in the hopes that we’ll get hooked and use it forever. They’re trying to find some way of coping with the fact that it’s so easy for music to be spread around easily. It’s a huge threat to the recording industry. It’s something Wesleyan has to worry about because it looks bad when their people get sued.
DW: What do you do when you’re not manning the network?
BDG: I have three campus jobs: One with the math and computer science department, one at the help desk, and another as a TA for Comp 211. I also take a lot of Greek. I went to the nerdiest high school ever, where we had to take Greek for at least two years. [Points to the Greek letters on his shirt] This is actually a spirit week t-shirt.
DW: And is that a fedora on your head?
BDG: Yes. Yes, it is.
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