The good people at the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are redoubling their efforts against college students. As a recent article in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian described, the RIAA has launched a new lawsuit and awareness campaign aimed at stopping college students from illegally sharing copyrighted music files via campus networks.
It's no secret that file-sharing is widespread on campuses. A recent report released by the Associated Press even indicated that the University of Massachusetts has the 6th highest number of file sharers in the country. This sort of activity is, of course, illegal, and yet the means by which the RIAA attempts to combat this problem are nothing short of criminal themselves.
The RIAA's chief tactic is to search for file sharers on the Internet and, once identified, sue them for copyright infringement. "Identified" is used rather loosely here, however, most of these lawsuits are filed against John Does pending some actual form of personal identification. Relatively few of these cases actually go to trial because, once identified, many people choose to settle out of court. There are many reasons why an accused person might do this even when innocent, the primary one being that the RIAA's settlement amount is lower than what attorney fees might be.
The RIAA's latest college push has a new twist to it: pre-lawsuit settlement letters. That's right; the RIAA will now kindly inform you via letter that you may settle for a "discounted rate before a lawsuit is ever filed." Not only that, but thanks to the RIAA's new Web site, www.p2plawsuits.com, you can admit guilt and pay your settlement fee with a major credit card all from the comfort of home. Thirty-seven UMass Amherst students will be receiving these letters in the first wave of the new campaign.
Oh, happy day. I'm not sure what to call this other than extortion. The RIAA promises not to drag you through a lawsuit if you'll hand over a fee (typically on the order of $3,000-$5,000). No wonder the RIAA is often referred to on the Internet as the "Mafia."
As recent court proceedings have shown in UMG v. Lindor, one of the few cases which has gone to trial, the RIAA's evidence often borders on the laughable. Since these cases so rarely go to trial, one would assume that the RIAA would make every effort to win, yet the evidence presented from the third parties they contract to find file sharers (companies like MediaSentry) and even their own expert witness shows that very little time goes into tracking down the accused. It is often done automatically by software.
Here at UMass, the Office of Information Technology receives a steady stream of copyright infringement notices which require a student's network connection be shutoff. They receive as many as 40 per day and almost all from the RIAA. The evidence provided to OIT is similar to that which the RIAA has presented in court, but as they receive so many complaints, OIT is unable to independently verify the claims. This new RIAA campaign would seem to indicate that some of these notices will be giving way to pre-lawsuit letters.
Defending the lawsuit or paying the fee, either one would be devastating to most college students. It's important, therefore, to have an idea of what to do if you are innocent and happen to fall into the RIAA's cross hairs. Regardless of how it ends, you'll be paying money to somebody, so get yourself a lawyer and hope the final resolution doesn't take too long. Being informed is important since the RIAA's detection methods can point the finger at the wrong person and have done so on numerous occasions. Once you've been sued you're only recourse is to prove your innocence and that's a very sad way to conduct justice. If you are engaged in illegally sharing copyrighted files, the best course of action is clearly to stop. But even if you're not, that's no guarantee that the RIAA won't come knocking.
Rather than put all this time and effort into suing potential customers, it sure would be nice if the music industry could offer a system that everybody liked. For starters, no more encumbering digital rights management (DRM) on music, so that you can use the files with any portable player. And lower prices. One dollar per song is not particularly high, yet it also seems reasonable that the cost of a downloaded CDs worth of music should cost substantially less than a physically manufactured CD, which it does not.
UMass students can get music from Ruckus for free, but even that system has substantial flaws. You can only use Ruckus if you're running Windows, and all music includes Microsoft's DRM so you can only use it on portable players which support it. Unfortunately, that list of players does not include iPods, which are by far the most prevalent.
Whichever route the new RIAA strategy takes, it's going to end up hurting a lot of students - some guilty, some innocent. And these tactics will continue to create ill feelings towards the music industry. If I was trying to build a new online market, that's the last thing I would want.
John Gruenfelder can be reached at johng@as.arizona.edu.
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