It was about two years ago when the Recording Industry Association of America sued two RPI students who they alleged administered file-sharing services which were illegal. Recently, the Institute received 20 notices from the RIAA requesting that the Institute preserve records that would enable it to comply with new subpoenas being sought by the association.
According to Sharon Roy, director of Academic and Research Computing, one subpoena has already been received by the Institute. The subpoenas seek to find out the identity of a network user from an IP address so that the association can name the individual in a copyright infringement lawsuit.
Dean of Students Mark Smith said that each notice “isn’t legally binding, but it requires an answer.” He said that given the notices, it would be unethical to not preserve the records, and Roy stated that the Institute would comply with the subpoenas.
Currently, RPI has only notified the one student whose information was already subpoenaed. The two said that the other 19 would probably not be notified until their identities were subpoenaed as well. According to Roy, “This is hugely time consuming for our staff.”
Smith advised students, “If you even suspect that you could be on such a list, stop and avoid the risk.” He said that students who were concerned that they might be identified by one of the 19 notices should contact his office and that those who do so would not face RPI student disciplinary action. He added that one of the real dangers with peer-to-peer software is that users may be sharing many of their files and may not even realize it.
An RIAA press release last month stated that the association filed 753 “John Doe” lawsuits for alleged copyright infringement, and the defendants included individuals at several colleges, one of which was RPI.
Reaction and response to the industry’s suits and other actions involving the Digital Millennium Copyright Act have been widespread across the country over recent years. The Pennsylvania State University began a campus-wide agreement with Napster in the beginning of this year so that its students could utilize its services at no additional cost to themselves. Smith said that at the forum held on file-sharing there was not much interest in a service like this being paid for by the activity fee.
Aside from the RIAA, several students received e-mails last year from RPI saying that the Motion Picture Association of America filed a complaint with the Institute about files they were sharing. The e-mail instructed users to delete the offending files and stop sharing files they did not have ownership rights for.
According to Roy, these complaints were reported to RPI’s DMCA agent in accordance with the act, the same way the RIAA used to place complaints before the suits became a more dominant strategy. Late last year, the MPAA announced that it would also begin suing individual infringers, but according to Smith they were especially concerned with pre-release pictures and said they did not want to be as aggressive with their suits as the RIAA.
