Archived Edition: April 18, 2007 | Back to Current	Sep 09, 2010

RIAA catches nine students
Ryan Ford - Staff Writer



Last week, nine Williams students received pre-settlement letters from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for illegal file sharing. The letters, which warned students of preliminary legal action, are part of the organization’s recent crackdown aimed at college students who use peer-to-peer (P2P) networks such as LimeWire. In the latest wave since late February, 431 letters were mailed to students around the country.

All nine students at the College have received letters from the RIAA offering to settle for $3000. One junior, who requested anonymity, plans to pay the fee, since “gambling that they won’t follow up on the lawsuit is not really worth the risk,” he said. He added that he had been using LimeWire for a couple of years and has downloaded around 1200 songs. “I’m a little shocked to be singled out, just because I figured that I wasn’t downloading particularly much – I don’t ever download movies or TV shows, just the occasional song.”

Another junior who wished to remain anonymous was also disinclined to take the issue to court because she felt that she does not fully understand the legal underpinnings involved. Furthermore, if she were to go on trial and lose the case, she would have to pay $750 per song in addition to legal fees. “That amounts to over $280,000 – more than my parents are paying for all four years at Williams,” she said.

“The RIAA is very serious about this,” said Dinny Taylor, chief technology officer at Office for Information Technology (OIT). “As people settle by paying their fees, I’m sure there will be more.”

People who started blocking files or deleting software since the April 6 campus-wide e-mail may still receive letters for earlier infringements. The RIAA, however, does not know anything about the people it targets. It simply identifies IP addresses. Colleges and universities are particularly easy to target because of their fast networks with specific IP ranges, according to Taylor.

Taylor emphasized that though the College does not scan the network for illegal traffic in copyrighted material, it cannot protect students from the legal recourse for copyright holders who do search through the Internet. “It’s up to students, now, to take the threat seriously and act accordingly to protect themselves,” Taylor said.

OIT will send out a letter to faculty and staff in the upcoming week. “They, too, must deal with this on their own and seek their own legal counsel if they receive one of these settlement letters,” Taylor said.

On the one hand, “Everyone who has contacted me with questions has seemed seriously concerned,” said Mike Gnozzio ’07, a student on the Information Technology Committee (ITC). But on the other, despite the all campus e-mail and ongoing Williams Student Online (WSO) discussions, Taylor reported that just in the past week, OIT has received several of cease and desist letters, alerting the College of students who have been sharing television shows and movies.

Nevertheless, Taylor speculated that the RIAA’s new tactic might prove to be successful. “We will only see it expand in the near future so this problem is not going away for Williams students,” she said. She added that pre-settlement letters are an easy way for organization to collect payments without having to get subpoenas to send Internet service providers.



A Wider Look



In addition to Williams, many colleges and universities nationwide have also been hard-hit. The most recent wave of pre-settlement litigation letters sent by the RIAA went out to 21 schools, including: Bates (7 letters received), Central Michigan University (24), Colby (5), Cornell (19), Ohio State University (50), Umass Amherst (32) and UPenn (17).

Findings from a 2006 study of music downloading activity reported that more than half of college students download music illegally. In 2006, college students alone accounted for 1.3 billion illegal music downloads. Although colleges do not represent the only hub for the RIAA to target, it is easy to identify college students making illegal downloads, since each college has a specific range of IP addresses. Thus, the RIAA can easily track down file sharing activity to a few addresses and identify them as belonging to students at any school.

According to Gene Wiemers, Bates’ vice president of Information and Library Services, Bates has adopted a position very similar to Williams’. “The administration has already said that they will not release any names unless required by court order or subpoena, but will forward the early settlement letters to the alleged offenders,” he said. Bates received seven pre-settlement letters this past week and decided that it would be a “disservice to our uses to keep them in the dark if we knew that there was a complaint pending against them,” Wiemers said.

Some schools, however, are unwilling to pass along the letters to their students. For example, the University of Wisconsin (UW) advised students against illegal file sharing but refused to forward the pre-settlement letters to students. “These settlement letters are an attempt to short circuit the legal process to rely on universities to be their legal agent,” according to a UW spokesperson. “We do not want to be a party to that; we are not the legal agent for the recording agency, nor do we aspire to [be].”

The Bates Student reported that the University of Kansas at Lincoln (UNL) is taking it one step further: “Not only is it refusing to forward the settlement letters, but it is suing the RIAA for wasting the University’s time, claiming that the RIAA is wasting taxpayers dollar’s by forcing UNL to process over 1000 complaints. UNL is asking to be reimbursed $11 per each warning letter.”