07 March 2008
On Campuses, Free Music Aplenty and Letters from Lawyers
College students debate illegal file-sharing, while industry takes action
Washington -- Greg Schrank had just returned from spring break when a dark cloud appeared on the horizon. It took the form of a 200-page complaint from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) accusing the Boston University freshman of downloading music illegally over the Internet -- one of thousands of such letters that lawyers for the music industry have sent college students since launching a crackdown against piracy five years ago.
“I felt the color drain from my face. I knew I was in trouble, but I had no idea what was going to happen to me,” Schrank wrote recently in The Daily Campus, the student newspaper at the University of Connecticut, where he is now a senior majoring in communications. His parents wound up paying nearly $4,000 to settle the case, and three years later, Schrank still is paying them back. These days he buys music from iTunes or uses Ruckus, a free, legal download service.
Despite admonitions from parents and college deans, music piracy remains rampant, and faster bandwidth has put bootleg movies within reach, too. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in 2005 that the P2P (peer-to-peer) file-sharing company Grokster could be sued for copyright infringement.
More recently, the recording industry won a $220,000 judgment against a 30-year-old Minnesota woman, Jammie Thomas, who had made 24 songs available to others on her computer, including music by Aerosmith, Sheryl Crow, Guns N’ Roses and Gloria Estefan. A jury determined the damages, which amounted to more than $9,000 per song. (The RIAA says the law allows damages of $750 to $150,000 for each infringement.) The trade group’s president, Cary Sherman, has called the lawsuits and threatening letters “tough love” necessitated by the loss of thousands of jobs and several billion dollars in sales revenue.
Some college students are upset by what they consider strong-arm tactics against the music industry’s best customers. To them, the RIAA is the dragon in the Chinese folk tale that turns up sporadically to gobble a villager or two.
Rich Jones, a Boston University sophomore and head of a Students for Free Culture chapter, which advocates loosening all copyright restrictions, rejects the argument that downloading music without paying is akin to shoplifting. “It’s not the same. If you have the means to get something [free], you’re going to do it,” said Jones, a computer science and psychology major. “We have the technology. We’re not going to go backward because their business model no longer works. They are going to have to adapt or die.”
Jones never has been the target of an RIAA complaint, but a housemate, Paul Sawaya, recently got “an intimidating package” from the RIAA demanding that he take down a jukebox application from Facebook.com. Other users of the social networking site had filled it with links to 44,000 songs -- including 1,495 that RIAA said were its property. Sawaya took them down and is tinkering with the program to keep anyone from adding links to forbidden music.
When it sends out “pre-litigation settlement offers,” the RIAA does not know precisely who downloaded the music. “What we have is the IP [Internet Protocol] address,” said spokeswoman Cara Duckworth. But the colleges and their information technology departments know whose computer it was, and the RIAA isn’t shy about getting subpoenas forcing the schools to surrender the names. Since February 2007, RIAA has dispatched more than 5,000 letters to suspected file-sharers at 150 colleges and universities. It has reached 2,300 settlements -- media reports say they are usually in the $3,000 to $5,000 range -- and pressed on with lawsuits against others.
“We understood that we were not going to be winning any popularity contests,” Duckworth said. “But it was absolutely necessary to give the legal marketplace some traction and to deter people from getting free music off sites like LiveWire.” The success of iTunes -- which has sold 4 billion songs since 2003 -- and the proliferation of other legal music-sales sites suggest that the anti-piracy campaign is working, Duckworth said.
Ben Mazer, who heads Swarthmore College’s Free Culture group, disagrees. The industry pockets most of the money when someone pays $18 for a CD, while “the average artist makes less than $1,” said Mazer, an announcer on the campus radio station. He contends sharing music “increases awareness of the artist, which will lead to more concert, merchandise and album sales.”
Mazer also believes that Congress and big business have extended the reach of copyright far beyond what the Founding Fathers intended. (Article I of the Constitution empowers Congress to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”)
“We tell people not to file-share, but if they do, not to download” from P2P networks that the RIAA can track, Mazer said. “We always say, ‘These things are risky.’”
