The Recording Industry Association of America sued another 532 people last week, including college students.
Eighty-nine students from 21 different colleges were included in the latest batch of law suits.
Now Fairfield is considering its options in the event that students here become involved in the lawsuits.
One practice already employed is tight controls on the amount of traffic allowed to visit illegal download services.
For Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, the reasons are clear.
“College campuses have been a very attractive place for file-sharing because of free and unlimited bandwidth,” Sherman said in an online press conference.
“Statistics posted by universities about the usage of their networks confirms that 60-70 percent and more is being consumed by file-sharing. And record stores near college campuses have been complaining loudly about the impact of illegal downloading on their businesses,” he said.
Don Adams, director of Computing and Network Services, is one of many in CNS who have kept an eye on the music downloading trend.
CNS has taken action to maintain the network’s integrity. “Peer to peer is severely choked,” Adams wrote in an e-mail to The Mirror.
“If it wasn’t restricted in this fashion the ‘non-academic’ activities would prevent legitimate academic usage of the network by students,” he wrote.
Adams noted that Fairfield does not reflect the 60 to 70 percent average.
“P2P is currently restricted to a small percentage of total bandwidth to ensure that other types of higher priority traffic do not get impeded,” Adams wrote.
The latest round of lawsuits, following recent legal action by the RIAA, have been filed as “John Doe” suits, where only an IP address-the computer’s unique identifying number on the Internet-is provided and the student is assumedly identified later.
Sherman said that, although not required, people generally aren’t in the dark if they’re being sued.
“We have encouraged all ISPs and universities to notify the defendants that their identity is being sought,” Sherman noted.
In previous rounds of lawsuits, ISPs have been generally willing to notify their users in advance of the attempts by the RIAA to identify and sue them.
Adams wrote, “Fairfield would act upon advice from legal counsel in this instance,” but did not note whether the school currently had a policy in place in the event the school was sued.
While legal options are now available, including Apple’s iTunes and Roxio’s Napster services, the school is not prioritizing any one service over another.
“Currently all forms of access are treated the same,” Adams wrote, “We have discussed changing this.”
One consideration the school is considering is having a “preferred partner” as a legal service.
Currently the school is in talks with Apple to potentially have an agreement with their iTunes Music Store, which might receive preferential treatments.
“If the iTunes service is implemented then it may carry a higher traffic priority,” Adams wrote.
Students were cautiously enthusiastic about the potential for a legal option that the school would support.
Chris Rossi ’05 said he’d go for it “if it was in the tuition. It depends on the price.”
Some were more excited, however.
“If the school offered a legal way to get music that was not illegal, I’d definitely want to do it,” said Cathy Auriana ’04. “It’d be faster.”
Ben Rossi ’05, however, was unenthused. “I don’t like paying if I can get it for free.”
Currently, no students in Connecticut have been targeted. This is mainly due to the fact that the RIAA is currently targeting their lawsuits in jurisdictions where they are already processing other suits.
Fairfield has also not been the target of “take down” notices, according to Adams.
The RIAA uses these notices as another form of deterrence. The organization essentially demands that the school take action against a user who is hosting a large number of illegal files on a peer to peer service.
Despite the lawsuits, students have not appreciably changed their practices, although some have gotten creative.
“The way we’ve done it, we do it all through one person’s computer,” said Kristine Poplawski ’04. “If we get caught, we’ll all pitch in to pay [the fine].”
Others are simply unconcerned.
“As is my understanding, they’re only going after people who are big downloaders,” said Chris Rossi. “I see myself as small-time.”
While Fairfield students have not been targeted so far, the RIAA hasn’t ruled out further litigation.
Sherman said, “This is an ongoing program. It won’t end with the settlement of these [89 college] cases.”
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