RIAA subpoenas ISPs and universities

After a long summer passed by with the help of part-time jobs, home-cooked meals and visits… After a long summer passed by with the help of part-time jobs, home-cooked meals and visits with high school friends, many Pitt students look forward to returning to the Concrete Jungle.

They look forward to seeing their college pals, to being away from the conformity that is their parents’ house or the heat that swelters in un-air-conditioned South Oakland apartments all summer. They also look forward to the high-speed Internet connections, found in most campus housing, that aid them in quicker MP3 downloads.

This year the connections are as fast as ever, but the downloading of songs might have to grind to a halt.Over the summer, the Recording Industry Association of America has made good on their threat to sue individual users for Internet piracy, citing the constant decline of record sales during the past three years as cause to sue, and claiming that this is the result of peer-to-peer file-sharing programs such as Kazaa or the one that started it all, Napster.

While Napster was shut down in 2001, other media masterminds were hard at work creating copycats of the peer-to-peer program. According to Kazaa’s Web site, peer-to-peer networks allow individual users connect to each other directly, without need for a central point of management.

The RIAA issued more than 1,000 subpoenas to various ISPs asking for the real names of Internet aliases and IP addresses to date, with the numbers continuing to rise. The original subpoena to Verizon occurred months ago, asking for the name of just one customer alleged to have illegal MP3s on his computer. Verizon refused to cooperate, fought the subpoena and lost. It appears to be a losing battle, as Verizon has appealed the decision twice and has lost both times.

SBC Communications Inc. and other ISPs have followed Verizon’s lead by filing suits of their own, saying that the RIAA’s subpoenas don’t comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which does not apply to individual users and their PCs.

Those most at risk for the subpoenas are users with an abundance of illegally obtained, copyrighted files on their computers. Just what, exactly, an abundant amount of files is remains undefined. Users with high-speed Internet connections are also at risk, specifically those who have a connection of T1 or higher. According to an employee of Pitt’s Technology Help Desk, residence halls here are equipped with Ethernet lines, which are extremely fast, around the T1 rate.To ease the minds of those who have illegally downloaded music, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has set up a Web site – http://www.eff.org – where those who may be at risk of lawsuits can check to see if their IP address or online alias is on the list of those who will be receiving subpoenas. Their minds can be eased only slightly, however, because new names are added to the list each day, and the EFF can’t entirely keep up with the RIAA.

The penalty for illegally obtained, copyrighted music is $750 to $150,000 per song. However, the RIAA are allowing defendants to propose their own settlements. Such was the case for Jesse Jordan, as reported in the August 21, 2003, issue of Rolling Stone. According to the article, Jordan and three fellow students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York were sued for about $900 million altogether for running peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. Jordan was able to settle for $12,000.

Universities are a hotbed for such subpoenas, as a large number of students have access to always-on, high-speed connections. As of press time, University spokesman Robert Hill could not be reached for information as to whether or not students at Pitt have received any subpoenas.

If users continue to download music from networks such as Kazaa and Gnutella, they may not get what they expected. According to a July 29, 2003, article on CNN.com, groups among the likes of MediaDefender have uploaded files claiming to be songs, but are actually a song length’s worth of silence or anti-pirating messages.

So are these lawsuits going to deter students from downloading music? Jason McKim, a first year Pitt graduate student who also completed his undergraduate work here, estimates his MP3 collection on his PC to be around 2,000. Despite the potential consequences, he said, he will continue to expand his collection.

“I see nothing to gain by these lawsuits,” he said. “Sure, they will deter a few people from downloading music. But the lawsuits will eventually stop, the threat will wear off, and we will be back to where we started, which is where we should be.”

We have been unable to access the RIAA’s Web site, http://www.riaa.org, since at least early July.