The recording industry filed copyright infringement lawsuits Thursday against four college students, accusing them of setting up Napster-like file-swapping services on their campus networks.
The civil suits claim the students exploited academic resources to illicitly trade as many as a million songs without permission from record labels or artists. Then, they publicly bragged about their exploits.
Washington University Law School Professor Charles McManis explained the issue of downloading from a legal perspective
“Downloading a file is making a copyright infringement,” said McManis. “The problem is that this isn’t complicated, people just don’t take copyright infringement seriously.”
In response to criticism of online sharing, senior Andrea Ugent said she loved the selection of music she found online.
“My music taste has expanded beyond belief,” said Ugent. “I honestly see too much benefit to sharing music-you’re making the music industry more readily available to your consumer.”
Ugent said she has bought CDs solely because she liked what she heard online.
The recording industry announced its campus crackdown last October, putting 2,300 university administrators on notice to curb student behavior – or face legal consequences. The suits seek not merely to halt the illegal music trading, but to slap each student with a maximum penalty of $150,000 per song.
The RIAA charges that each student, in a calculated attempt to evade university restrictions on illegal music copying, used software known as Flatlan, Phynd or Direct Connect, to create their own underground file-swapping services on their campus networks.
ResTech Director Matt Arthur explained how WU handles these situations and what is being done to prevent such legal implications from being placed on the WU community.
“We have not had a complaint about Direct Connect and copyright issues,” he said. “[However] as more network anomalies popped up, we dealt with them.”
In response to the liabilities Direct Connect, WU tries to follow a certain course of action.
We turn off their access, alert them to the accusations, and tell them of the dangers,” said Arthur. Then we set up a meeting to try and educate them as to the situation, the complaint, and how they violated copyright.”
Some in the academic community applauded the recording industry for placing blame for alleged acts of copyright infringement where it belongs: individual students.
“It just seems morally wrong to me, that’s why I prescribe to the MusicMatch radio service,” said sophomore Stephen Powers. “You can’t download it, but you can listen to it at any time. You need to think long term.”
Others, however, criticized the labels for making an example instead of working with universities to curb the problem that exploits campus resources and infringes copyrights.
“They shouldn’t be looking to students as their main source of income anyway, we have no money,” said sophomore Jared Joiner.
Although it is completely legal, according to copyright legislation to go after student violators and attach no responsibility to universities, WU is taking efforts to educate the student body to issues of copyright infringement.
“I think there is a level where the university has to educate their students,” said Arthur. “It’s a part of university responsibility to educate people to the ramifications of using all this new technology.”
Legally, McManis explains the situation university administrators face.
“Universities can play one of two roles in these situations,” said McManis. “One, they can be vicariously liable. Two, they might be held liable due to their own culpable failure to deter the infringement by one of their students. The liability of the university is based on the liability of the student.”
For such reasons, Restech is going to be working next year with Residential Life to alert incoming freshman of the dangers of copyright infringement, hoping that the information will eventually reach the rest of the community.
“Living in a Reslife hall is still a transitional experiment and this is a part of that,” said Arthur, quoting a colleague’s previous comment.