FC: RIAA to P2P users: the gloves are coming off

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2003 08:52:16 -0800 (PST)
From: Joseph Lorenzo Hall <jhall () astron Berkeley EDU>
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>, Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
Subject: chron of higher ed: riaa lawsuits
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[Dave, Declan: this appears to be the first lawsuit against students
directly. And the RIAA seems to have royally pissed off the
universities as well. The damages seem to be large:"The lawsuits ask
for $150,000 for each of the dozens of recordings, listed by title in
the complaint, that the students allegedly used illegally."]

Friday, April 4, 2003
http://chronicle.com/free/2003/04/2003040401t.htm

Recording Industry Sues 4 Students for Allegedly Trading Songs Within
College Networks
By SCOTT CARLSON

The Recording Industry Association of America filed lawsuits on
Thursday against four college students who allegedly were offering
access to copyrighted music files within their institutions' networks.

Joseph Nievelt, a student at Michigan Technological University;
Daniel Peng, a student at Princeton University; and Aaron Sherman and
Jesse Jordan, both students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, were
named in separate suits filed in federal district courts in Michigan,
New Jersey, and New York. The institutions were not sued.

According to the complaints, the students have "taken a network
created for higher learning and academic pursuits and converted it
into an emporium of music piracy." In a news release, the recording
industry alleges that the students were engaging in copyright
infringement, each offering from 27,000 to more than a million songs
to other students.

The lawsuits ask for $150,000 for each of the dozens of recordings,
listed by title in the complaint, that the students allegedly used
illegally.

The students could not be reached for comment.

Bob Gilreath, the telecommunications engineer at Michigan Tech, was
shocked and angered by the lawsuits. His university has a long record
of cooperating with the recording industry, he said. The institution
runs copyright-education programs and routinely shuts down the
Internet access of students who share copyrighted material. He said
that the recording industry had never notified the university about
Mr. Nievelt's alleged infringement.

"We have had this relationship with them for years, and for them to
come in and do what they are doing here -- taking a different route
without going through our channels -- is basically flabbergasting,"
he said. He added that the lawsuits will "send the wrong message to
colleges and universities" that are trying to help the recording
industry stop file sharing. "In these tight budget situations,
[colleges] are going to say, Why should we spend time and money on
this when they are going to go ahead and sue anyway?"

Officials at Princeton offered similar complaints. "We have been very
responsible in terms of not allowing illegal sharing on campus," said
Lauren Robinson-Brown, the university's director of communications.
"We have a procedure, and it would be encouraging if that procedure
is followed."

At all three institutions, the students named in the lawsuits could
face disciplinary hearings.

The action by the recording industry differs slightly from the
organization's past complaints about programs like KaZaA, which allow
users to share files internationally. The new lawsuits are aimed at
users of file-sharing programs that limit searches and users to
computers within a specific network. A student user of such a program
might be able to swap songs or videos only with other students on a
college's residential network, for example. One such program, Phynd,
has operated not only at RPI, but also at the University of
Connecticut and the University of Maryland at College Park.

Cary Sherman, president of the recording-industry association, did
not respond to calls from The Chronicle. But in a letter mailed on
Thursday to Graham B. Spanier, president of Pennsylvania State
University at University Park, Mr. Sherman complained that "as
Internet bandwidth becomes increasingly congested and slows to a
crawl, students are likely to turn to on-campus systems instead."

...

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From: "Danny Yavuzkurt" <ayavuzk () fas harvard edu>
To: <declan () well com>
Subject: RIAA to P2P users: the gloves are coming off
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2003 14:30:53 -0500

Again, you've probably seen this already - but it's worth a shot,
nonetheless.   The RIAA has finally done what everyone was predicting they'd
do - they've picked a few scapegoats to blame the P2P 'problem' on, and
they're suing them within an inch of their lives.  Four college students, to
be precise.  From good schools, too - two from Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute, one from Princeton, and one from Michigan Technical.  For
$150,000 per 'violation'.  Oh, and don't forget about the potential jail
time.. since the NET act makes it possible, if the 'value' of the 'stolen'
goods is over $1000... and I'm sure they'll claim it is, since the article
quotes 'millions of songs'.

What's also interesting here is that they're being charged with distributing
the songs not over the Internet in general, but over the internal university
networks, using Phynd, FlatLAN, or Direct Connect (www.neomodus.com).  The
universities don't usually crack down on these services because they don't
affect the outgoing or incoming bandwidth from their Internet point of
presence (which they have to pay for).  I know many people personally who
use Direct Connect on the PSU campus (remember that letter Leto sent you a
few days back, sent to all the PSU students?..) - so, this represents a
significant change from trying to kill not only the 'main' P2P services like
Kazaa and Grokster, which operate on the Internet at large, but also anyone
who wants to swap files with others, even over a LAN..

-Danny

Note: There's also a big discussion about this on Slashdot
(http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/03/2312220)

Article text: (Sorry this isn't formatted more pleasingly, but Outlook
Express has developed this nasty habit of crashing whenever I try to add
return characters to large blocks of text.  I'm moving to Eudora.)


http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/5558442.htm

Posted on Fri, Apr. 04, 2003



Students accused of piracy
RECORD SUIT SEEKS $150,000 PER SONG
By Dawn C. Chmielewski
Mercury News



The recording industry filed copyright infringement lawsuits Thursday
against four college students, accusing them of setting up Napster-like
file-swapping services on their campus networks.
The civil suits claim the students exploited academic resources to illicitly
trade as many as a million songs without permission from record labels or
artists. Then, they publicly bragged about their exploits.
``This is a particularly flagrant way to illegally distribute millions of
copyrighted works over the Internet,'' said Cary Sherman, president of the
Recording Industry Association of America, the industry's trade association.
The students operated ``a sophisticated network designed to enable
widespread thievery,'' he said.
The recording industry telegraphed its campus crackdown in October putting
2,300 university administrators on notice to curb student behavior -- or
face legal consequences.
Major universities, including Stanford and Pennsylvania State, responded
with tough new computer use policies, treating music and movie downloads
with the same seriousness as other intellectual property crimes, such as
plagiarism. In November, the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., went so
far as to seize the computers of 100 midshipmen accused of possessing
pirated music.
...




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