RIAA Finally Snaps

Man, I hope this hasn't been posted...

I've always been torn by file sharing. On one hand, I know how incredibly destructive it is to songwriters and struggling artists. I've explained my point here ad naseum so I won't belabor it.

On the other hand, like most musicians, I freakin' hate the record industry for it's deplorable treatment or music and artists not to mention its reshaping of an artform into strictly a form of commerce, but that's for another thread.

This, however, just about seals it for me. By acting this way, the RIAA is doing everything possible to alienate their own customers and ensure their own collapse. If there is one thing we all know, it is that you absolutely cannot bully teenagers into doing what you want them to do. Not only will they NOT do it, they'll turn around and do the exact opposite just out of spite.

Ugh.

<i>HEATHER NEWMAN: Recording industry has warning: File-sharers have to face the music
April 5, 2003
BY HEATHER NEWMAN
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

Lawsuits against four college students accused of trading copyrighted songs are the biggest punch yet by the recording industry against its core audience, and has experts worried that the next step will be suing the colleges themselves.

The Recording Industry Association of America filed the suits Thursday in three federal courts, naming one student each at Michigan Technological University and Princeton University and two others from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who ran Napster-like file-sharing services on their campus computer networks.

<b>The damages sought by the suits are astronomical: $150,000 per song, the maximum allowed by law. Multiply that by the 652,000 or so songs the RIAA alleges student Joseph Nievelt offered to other Michigan Tech students on his service, and the scope of the suit is clear.

That total? About $97.8 trillion -- yes, trillion with a T -- or enough money to buy every CD sold in America last year over again for the next 120,000 years, according to RIAA statistics. And that's just Nievelt's case. </b>

RIAA senior vice president for business and legal affairs Matthew Oppenheim said the suits are intended to send a clear message to anyone running these types of services that punishment will be swift and severe.

Experts say they worry that the students, who are unlikely to actually have to pay those soaring sums, won't always be the sole targets of the RIAA's notoriously aggressive copyright defenses.

The RIAA has traditionally encouraged colleges to work with it and other industry groups, sending two letters in the past six months to university presidents urging them to take action against student violators.

But Oppenheim said he also expected Thursday's suits to be a notice to colleges officials who haven't kept track of what's happening on their networks. These weren't small violations, he stresses, and at this scale, the amount of Internet traffic generated by one account is huge.

His group didn't send its standard cease-and-desist letter to Michigan Tech before filing suit, something that Michigan Tech officials have publicly complained about. But this wasn't a typical situation, he said.

"Going forward, I wouldn't think there was a university in the country that wouldn't notice this kind of activity on their servers," he said. "My guess is universities are going to be much more concerned than they have in the past. I don't think any university wants to see their students sued."

It's not that easy, said Michigan Tech spokeswoman Marcia Goodrich, who said the school has gone the extra mile in cooperating with copyright groups.

"Now it's like, why did we go through all the trouble to work with you guys?" she said. Students operate more than 10,000 Web sites, she said. The university deals with 80,000 scans a day by potential hackers. And school officials have investigated nearly 80 complaints against students this year, putting nearly 60 on probation and taking other disciplinary measures.

And that's where things get legally sticky for universities, said Virginia Rezmierski, adjunct associate professor at the University of Michigan's School of Information and Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

She said she thinks schools have made a mistake by cooperating with investigators and shutting down students who have been the subject of prior cease-and-desist letters from the RIAA and other organizations.

"If you agree that you're liable in any way, then you have no alternative to monitor the networks," she said. "You're putting yourself in a position that you can't possibly fulfill."

Even if that were technically possible with the staff the universities have, monitoring the flow of information on college networks is contrary to everything schools of higher education are about, she said. "We're providing this access as part of an environment for learning and teaching. It's used by a growing, learning community," she said.

And the RIAA's lawsuits against the students and others who operate file-sharing systems? "The purpose is intimidation," said Rezmierski, "and they're winning."

Published reports said the RIAA got the names of the four students from articles in college newspapers. Andrew Dobos, editor in chief of the Michigan Tech Lode, said that while he found an article decrying piracy in his archives, he found none that mention Nievelt specifically.

"The general consensus is that it's horse manure," he said, adding that the penalties were too high. "Even if he was doing that, I don't see that any member of the recording industry is hurting as a result of what these students have done. If he's like an average student, he maybe makes $4,000 a year -- and these rich people are suing him for all this money? How heartless do you have to be?"

"Stealing is stealing," Oppenheim said. "Those are major, significant networks. This was a student who created a piracy bazaar."

Contact HEATHER NEWMAN at 313-223-3336, newman@freepress.com or www.freep.com/tech</i>