Campuses Whip Back to College Crackdown

The Record Industry Association of America is cracking down on piracy on college campuses, a site where excessive piracy occurs due to illegal file-sharing over high-speed college internet networks. The RIAA’s tactic-- sending letters not to the students themselves who have been targeted, but to their universities. They recently sent out pre-litigation letters to 400 students via their respective 13 universities across the country that threaten lawsuit if the student doesn’t settle for between $3,000-$5,000 within the next 20 days. The student can log on to p2plawsuits.com and make a quick settlement online in order to avoid litigation. The organization plans to send 400 more next month. The university is expected to forward the letter to the student, acting as a messenger for the RIAA. This tactic makes the university aware of the problem of copyright infringement at their school, and the RIAA hopes that this will encourage universities to begin to implement methods that would tackle the problem and stop piracy at their university. Additionally, it is meant to create bad publicity for the university as a whole (USC has made RIAA’s publicly-issued ranking of the College Piracy Top Five, coming in fifth.)

However, campuses are cracking the whip of resistance against the RIAA. University of Maine has joined with administration at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Nebraska in a refusal to be the messenger for RIAA and a refusal to provide student information to the RIAA for them to target said student for piracy. The universities will inform the student if they receive a pre-litigation letter, but they will not forward it to the student directly and the student will have to come pick it up from a disclosed location.

The fact of the matter is that their method of attacking the user through their school will fail to stop kids from downloading music illegally, and more and more campuses will begin to be uncooperative with the RIAA’s requests. Check out this video that was released by the RIAA, available via YouTube and sent out to schools across the country explaining how students are able to be caught and targeted for piracy.

The video wasn't well received by students (many of the YouTube comments are sarcastic and its clear that the video is corny.) As a student at a top-five-targeted school, I never saw the video so USC must not have distributed it widely. While most campuses have implemented student conduct codes that prohibit file sharing, still these restrictions just won’t stop students from sharing. Since 2003, there have been 18,000 lawsuits, yet P2P filesharing has increased froom 5.5 million users per month to 9.3 million.

Piracy is definitely an issue, but suing the consumer is not the solution. The RIAA needs to develop a way for students to access music when and where they want it, free of restrictions, and they will be willing to pay for their tunes if they get the product they want.