RIAA v. College Students

The March 23, 2007 Associated Press story, RIAA: Students Settling Piracy Claims, describes the latest front in the digital music wars. Whether one calls it "music sharing" or "piracy", regardless of philosophical and ethical positions, this issue is one of the banes of higher ed IT departments. At colleges and universities, the IT departments have additional responsibilities because they serve as an Internet Service Provider - even more so when that institution provides residential facilities.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has conducted an extremely aggressive legal campaign against ordinary individuals that has fostered much more animosity and ill-will than sympathy or fear. The RIAA has served a couple of rounds of pre-litigation notifications in the name of John Does at the colleges and universities based on IP address, "many" are accusations of copyright infringement (and what were the others?) The RIAA then attempts to use the lawsuits to discover the names of the students. These educational institutions find themselves in a difficult legal and policy position, between the copyright infringement law and protecting the rights and privacies of students.

The RIAA has taken an interesting new approach, offering deals for those who are willing to engage them. This article references a letter to an individual Ohio University student, valuing her 787 counts of infringements at $590,000. However, the RIAA is making offers through schools' attorneys of $3,000 to $5,000. How are we to understand the discrepancy in value for this offense? What makes a plaintiff eager to settle a lawsuit for less than 1% of claimed damages? Certainly one of the motivating factors has to be the difficulty in identifying and prosecuting defendants. To that end, the RIAA is offering to settle "P2P" suits online. At the time of the writing 116 students had settled. Stay tuned to see how these institutions will respond to this strategy.