Information Technology Committee: Students and the RIAA

One of the issues that we’re constantly discussing on the Information Technology Committee is the attack on students by the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA. The RIAA employs a small army to search the large public file sharing networks to find people sharing music which the RIAA claims a copyright. For many years, the RIAA would send a “Cease and Desist” letter to the people it believed to be violating their copyright, or if it could not identify the person directly it would send the letter to the ISP that person used to connect to the Internet, such as Charter, TDS, or for many students, the UW. A new twist emerged this past spring, with the deliberate targeting of file sharers on college campuses and a significant upping of the ante. The Cease and Desist letters became “Pre-settlement notices,” threatening the student with a lawsuit unless they accepted an offer to settle before the lawsuit was filed. For most people, this offer was between $3000 and $4000 dollars. These “Pre-settlement notices” have, as far as anyone can tell, only gone to people using college networks, and have completely ignored people on commercial networks, such as home cable modem or DSL users. The RIAA has had a pattern of sending notices to about 20 universities a month, to about 500 students in each batch. 16 UW-Madison students received letters in March of 2007, and another 28 in September. No UW student was included in the October, November, or December batch. The UW believes most students who receive the letters settle, rather than go through the time and expense of a court battle.

As students at a research institution, we are acutely aware of the need for respect of the intellectual and artistic creations of others. We want to have a larger conversation about copyrights. It is especially important now to all students. A generation ago, the best a senior thesis could hope for was actually getting on a library shelf, and not just in the bottom of a pile in a professor’s office. Now our creations have the ability to be made available and locatable to the entire world with ease. The RIAA’s insistence on discussing copyright only as “stealing music” has made an education campaign about copyright more difficult, and drowns out many of the other important topics we need to discuss. We are going to have that conversation, and we’re going to do it on our terms, not the RIAA’s.

Our main goal right now is increase student awareness about the RIAA’s targeting of students. The message is going to be kept simple:

The RIAA is out to get you, if you’re not sure if you’ve placed yourself at risk, here’s who can answer your questions.

That’s it. We’ll have a larger conversation about copyrights later. We want students to understand the risk they’re placing themselves under, and let them make their own decisions. We are convinced that some of the people who have received pre-settlement notices had no idea they were doing anything that could get them involved in a lawsuit.

On Friday, December 14^th at 9AM we’ll be meeting in room 3207 of Computer Sciences to hash out the exact wording of the message. The meeting will be majority students, along with a few members of DoIT staff and maybe a representative from the Dean of Students office. We hope that we can craft an effective message for students. ResNet users will all see the message when they return from winter break, possibly along with the wider campus. We do not expect our message will magically convince all students to stop infringing on copyrighted music, but we hope that we get to a point where no student is surprised if they get a pre-settlement notice.

Ron Kraemer, the Vice Provost for Information Technology and Campus Chief Information Officer, and his staff have put together a good page about the RIAA response on campus here. You may also be interested in this article from the Badger Herald about a student who settled with the RIAA.

If you have suggestions for the message, please comment, or come to our Friday morning meeting. (Yes, it’s early, and the last day of classes, but we’re trying to get this done before break)