RIAA has new target

Recently, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association… Recently, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America sent letters to 40 university leaders indicating that movie and music piracy had been detected on their local area networks.

The letters also recommended ways for system administrators to cut back on Local Area Network piracy.

Local Area Networks are computer networks connecting many computers in a given area to one another. According to the MPAA and RIAA, LANs allow college students to illegally download movies and music from one another without accessing the public Internet.

Programs like iTunes offer students the chance to listen to other people’s music as long as they’re on the same network. Piracy programs such as MyTunes or OurTunes allow the user to download songs from other computers.

While peer-to-peer file-sharing programs like Limewire and Kazaa still account for the majority of illegal downloads, the MPAA and RIAA said that more students are turning to private LANs to download media.

“Unfortunately, this is a growing problem,” Gayle Osterberg, spokeswoman for the MPAA, said.

“As peer-to-peer networks are shut down, students are increasingly turning to programs on local area networks,” Jenni Engebretsen, a spokeswoman for the RIAA, said.

“A large percentage of Internet piracy is being committed on college campuses,” Osterberg said. “It’s something that is of a great concern to our industry.”

According to Osterberg, 30 percent of movie piracy occurs on college campuses. She said the letters were the “opening effort” toward curbing LAN-based piracy.

Osterberg said that in addition to the letters, the MPAA has created a department of education whose purpose is to reach out to colleges.

According to Engebretsen, in addition to dialogue with universities, future efforts from the RIAA might include technological developments to protect against illegal downloading, promoting legal file sharing and “enforcing our rights.”

Engebretsen would not comment on whether continued LAN piracy might result in lawsuits. She said that “all options are on the table.”

“We did take action in 2003,” Engebretsen said, referring to lawsuits brought against four college students for operating LANs in April of that year.

“All of these strategies are available to us,” Osterberg said. She did not say whether the MPAA had plans for any future legal actions.

According to an article in an October 2005 Pitt News, the RIAA filed lawsuits against 757 people for sharing music online through programs like Limewire and Kazaa. One of the people in these lawsuits was a Pitt student. A previous round of lawsuits in April of 2005 linked 16 Pitt accounts to file-sharing activities.

The April 27 letters suggest two programs to cut back on LAN piracy: RedLambda’s cGrid and Audible Magic’s CopySense.

According to the CopySense Web site, the program works by checking a file’s electronic fingerprint against a database of copyright-protected material and filtering out copyrighted files.

The RIAA and MPAA have not released the names of the 40 schools contacted in their campaign. University of Pittsburgh representatives could not be reached to comment on whether Pitt was one of the schools contacted.

Osterberg said she would not rule out releasing the names of the schools in the future.

Engebretsen would not say how the 40 schools were identified as having LAN-based piracy, but claimed the RIAA had information indicating a problem at each of the schools.

Osterberg said that some schools have already responded to the letter. According to her, the response has been “mostly positive.”