Since the days of Napster, people have been illegally downloading and sharing music files on peer-to-peer networks. Last April, Marc Fedoras ’09 was sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for $135,000, which averaged out to $750 per song.
A recent campus announcement on StagWeb notified students that Jamie Thomas, a Dartmouth student, was found guilty in a civil lawsuit that ruled her computer was used to distribute 24 different music files, and ordered her to pay the RIAA $222,000.
Despite several attempts, Fedoras could not be reached for comment.
Associate Vice President and Dean of Students Thomas Pellegrino said that “copyright infringement and illegal downloading has been a phenomenon on
college campuses nationwide for some time, albeit to varying degrees.”
“From what I hear from students I have spoken to, our campus-wide
notifications in the spring and again this semester have assisted in raising the issue to the attention of our network users,” he added.
The fight against unauthorized downloading is an uphill battle that colleges and associations nationwide are having difficulty keeping up with due to the ever-increasing number of file-sharing sites.
One sophomore, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of self-incrimination, said, “There’s so many ways kids can get music, it’s almost impossible to stop. I go to shareminor.com, and download from there because that one hasn’t been blocked yet.”
Popular peer-to-peer sites such as Limewire, WinMX and MyTunes have been “blocked” by the amount of bandwidth priority they are given.
Jay Rozgonyi, assistant director of Computing ‘ Networking Services explained the process.
“Since we [decide the] amount of bandwidth that runs on the network, we can prioritize academic sites and ensure that there will be an insufficient amount of bandwidth for anything unsanctioned and non-academic,” he said.
Rozgonyi added that, while he supports the crusade against illegal acquisition of music, he does not particularly agree with the methods being used by the RIAA.
“The RIAA is going after mostly students and filing lawsuits for ridiculous amounts of money. The principle behind their argument is good, but settling for $3,000 for a student is excessive,” he said.
Students around campus have mixed feelings on the subject and the methods the University and the RIAA are using to combat it.
Taylor Ferrancane ’11 said, “I don’t think it should be blocked. It’s the students’ own choice whether they want to download illegally. Also $2,000 is a lot of money just for downloading music.”
Desiree DeJong ’08 disagreed and believes that illegal downloading is hurting the music industry as a whole.
“I buy all of my CDs,” she said. “I think stealing music is wrong because it is very damaging to the music industry. If someone wants to do it, the University shouldn’t stop them, but I don’t think it’s the right thing to do.”
Pellegrino commented on the average student’s ability to police themselves in the matter of illegal file sharing.
“There are many areas where students can be advocates for themselves, but I can think of few more appropriate to self-advocacy than this,” he said. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
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