The Recording Industry Association of America filed lawsuits against four college students late last week, including two students at RPI, in an attempt to stamp out music swapping on college campuses. Aaron Sherman, a senior majoring in Management, and Jesse Jordan, an Information Technology freshman, were sued for administering services that allow students to search the network for files, which the RIAA calls “local area Napster networks,” and for holding hundreds of MP3s on their own computers.
In addition to court orders shutting down their services, the RIAA is seeking compensation for attorneys’ fees and also $150,000 for each song on the students’ computers, which is the maximum penalty.
Sherman developed the Flatlan network search engine while Jordan runs chewplastic.com, which hosts a Phynd search engine. E-mailed requests for comments to both went unanswered.
According to Megan Galbraith of the Office of Communications, RPI is gathering information to see if the students violated the Institute’s Policy on Electronic Citizenship. “If there is sufficient evidence to indicate that the students have violated Rensselaer’s policy, the university will activate its student judicial process to conduct an investigation and take appropriate action,” she said.
Interested groups from both sides have begun to voice their opinions on the matter. Many of the opponents of the suit have been quick to point out that while Napster, which the RIAA successfully sued to shut down in 2001, provided the servers for people to connect to one another and share files, these campus services run on an existing network through which students could share files without the aid of the four students’ services.
“It does seem like all it’s doing is indexing resources that are available on a network that people are already a part of,” said Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney with the digital civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in an interview with news.com. “It doesn’t seem like there’s anything wrong with building a tool to do that. And it doesn’t seem like there’s anything wrong with running that tool.”
The RIAA dismissed these opinions, however. According to Senior Vice President Matt Oppenheim, the differences are “irrelevant from a copyright perspective. All of these are networks created for one purpose and are being used for infringement.”
“This is another in a string of unfortunate efforts by the recording industry to treat music fans like criminals,” said von Lohmann. “File-sharing is here to stay—more Americans have used Kazaa than voted for President Bush. The answer is not more lawsuits, but making file-sharing legal while getting artists paid.”
RPI students have been reacting to these lawsuits as well. “The Phynd servers just told users which computer had the content they were looking for. If the RIAA wants to sue someone, they should sue Microsoft, who developed the system that the files were actually transferred with,” said Jason Coutermarsh, CSCI ’06.
The RIAA also filed suits against Daniel Peng of Princeton University and Joseph Nievelt of Michigan Technological University. According to The Detroit Free Press, Nievelt holds over 652,000 MP3s on his own computer, a number that yields a total fine of $97.8 billion, or 120 times last year’s CD sales, if the RIAA is granted the amount it requested.
The suits have sent shockwaves to campuses throughout the country. Boogle, a similar service run at Brandeis University, shut itself down to prevent a lawsuit mere days after posting an April Fool’s joke about being taken over by the RIAA.
The RIAA has been attempting to crack down on college students for months. Last month the RIAA sent letters to 300 companies to inform them of illegal music swapping on their networks and threatening legal action, and, according to Hillary Rosen, chief executive for the RIAA, the group sends approximately 2,500 notices a month to universities warning them of file-sharing. At the University at Albany, more than 180 students have at least temporarily lost Internet access after the group complained about individual students’ violations.
