On Friday April 3 the RIAA named two RPI students in a lawsuit claiming that they operate a “sophisticated network designed to enable widespread music thievery.” The pieces of software that are the crux of the RIAA’s lawsuit are better known as Phynd and Flatlan. For those that don’t know, Phynd allows students to search all computers on the RPI network for files shared by the computer’s owner, and Flatlan is a Windows program that is a front-end for the Phynd search utility. The RIAA, in their press release, claims that these utilities facilitate the “thievery” of copyrighted material. While I’m not naïve enough to say that what we do, and I do say we, because I participate as well, isn’t stealing music, I will say that Phynd and Flatlan do not, themselves, provide the functionality of a Napster or Kazaa-type file sharing program. Whereas Napster and Kazaa allow the user to share files through the program itself, Phynd and Flatlan merely list and provide search functionality for the files provided on the network by Microsoft Windows’ built-in file sharing functionality. This, in and of itself, is a significant difference, as even if Phynd and Flatlan were not available, any student could still connect to another student’s PC and “steal” copyrighted material through Microsoft’s file sharing functionality. In this way, Phynd and Flatlan aren’t much different from Google and its image search, which provides access to hundreds of thousands of copyrighted pictures, allowing the user to “steal” these images.

This then begs the question: Are Phynd and Flatlan to blame, or is it the fault of Microsoft’s file sharing functionality? If it is Phynd and Flatlan that facilitate the file sharing as the RIAA claims, then why is it that students will still be equally able to download copyrighted material even when they are shut down? While I don’t know either of the accused students personally, I believe that RPI, as a forward-thinking institution, should be responsible enough to stand up for the civil liberties of its students. Moreover, this is an excellent opportunity for the Science and Technologies Studies department to truly get involved in a social issue that directly affects the RPI community, perhaps by inviting the RIAA’s representatives to a moderated debate on the definition of what facilitates music “thievery.” I hope that the RPI community supports these students, and that this will help to serve as a wake up call to those who sit idly by as the Patriot Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and other legislation is used to strip us of our civil liberties.

Scott Coull