As some may have heard, the Recording Industry Association of America last week filed suit against two RPI students, along with a student at Princeton University and another Michigan Technological University. These students operate the local network search engines known as Phynd and Flatlan.

As one of the original developers of Aimster, a file-sharing network that originated at a company in RPI’s Incubator Center several years ago, I have a bit of experience with the RIAA and its heavy-handed tactics. I have the following advice for the two RPI students involved: Give in to the demands of the RIAA. The people who are after you are ruthless, powerful, and have pockets deeper than you could imagine. As students, you cannot hope to stand up to them for long, and fighting back by yourselves is more trouble than it is worth. While you have done nothing wrong by indexing Windows networking shares, they will do everything in their power to convince the courts that your intentions were dishonorable, and eventually they will win because of their resources. Yes, capitulate now—unless, of course, you have the help of a major organization (such as the EFF) and the will to dig in for the long haul—in which case I applaud your resolve and wish you the best.

I also have this advice for the RPI administration: You must be the ones to take a stand. These two students have neither the means to fight the RIAA nor the credibility of a large institution. RPI, if it ever hopes to be relevant in this digitally-driven age, must defend the rights of its students to develop tools that are as obviously non-infringing as Phynd and Flatlan. If Phynd is illegal, then so is Google—both perform almost exactly the same function, indexing openly available files. Phynd has the potential to be just as useful as Google, though on a smaller scale, particularly to large organizations with vast internal networks (such as RPI or, say, IBM). RPI must respond to the RIAA; it must tell them that it will protect its students’ right to innovate. If it allows the RIAA to trample over these two students, then how long will it be before others are targeted—researchers in distributed systems whose results apply to peer-to-peer networks, for example?

I can understand if RPI will not help students who clearly undermine intellectual property laws by themselves illegally distributing copyrighted works. The two students currently being targeted by the RIAA are not being attacked for this reason, but simply because software they maintain has the potential to enable copyright infringement. So do CD-Rs. So does FTP. So does TCP/IP. So do VCRs and tape recorders, not to mention paper and pencil. All of these are enabling technologies for copyright infringement. What will the RIAA, the MPAA, and their ilk go after next? RPI has kindly been given an opportunity by the RIAA to stand up and speak for the innovators, and it should.

Kris Beevers