RIAA push against student filesharers

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 22 February 2007 05:43

Your IT - Home IT

The RIAA is getting a mixed reaction from US colleges targeted in its latest attempt to stop peer-to-peer distribution of its members' tracks.

According to reports, the 25 universities topping the hit list have received nearly 15,000 complaints, but not all the institutions concerned are doing the RIAA's dirty work for it.

Purdue University is high on the list, but takes the view that tracking down individual students from an IP address is more trouble than it's worth. A spokesperson said it is not the university's job to investigate such complaints, and its students are not repeat offenders. That's lucky for Purdue, otherwise it might be open to a court case.

Other universities have taken a variety of measures including counselling students accused of sharing copyright material, taking technical measures to block P2P traffic (notwithstanding the legitimate uses of file sharing),  permitting access only after a student has signed a waiver, removing internet access rights completely, or even suspension.

The RIAA complains to universities instead of taking legal action when students share small numbers of songs. Our guess is that the individuals are largely 'leeches' that only share the track(s) they are currently downloading.

Part of problem facing the RIAA seems to be that just as recording music from the radio and TV onto cassette tapes was normal behaviour for an earlier generation (think Bow Wow Wow's 1980 single "C30, C60, C90, Go"), using BitTorrent and similar technologies has become the norm for Generation Y, with purchasing reserved for the music that people really like.