U Weekly. Serving The Ohio State University in Columbus Ohio

RIAA goes after more OSU students

By Wayne Mulvane

The Recording Industry Association of America has once again stepped up its campaign against college students who allegedly engage in illegal file sharing, including 30 more students at Ohio State.

The letters sent to Ohio State students are part of a larger wave of pre-litigation settlement letters sent to 401 students at 12 universities. Although Ohio State was the only Ohio school to receive such letters this time around, Purdue and Indiana University were also targeted this week by the music industry.

As UWeekly noted in January, the recording industry can not immediately identify the students it believes have downloaded music illegally. Instead, they give the information they have, the student’s unique IP address, to the university, who are then asked to forward on the letters. Some schools, such as the University of Orgeon, opt not to identify some of their students to the RIAA. While nine Ohio State students are involved in a lawsuit seeking to prevent Ohio State from identifying them to the RIAA, the university otherwise forwards on the letters the group gives them.

The RIAA says that the alleged that the illegal downloading comes from peer-to-peer services such as Ares, BitTorrent, Gnutella, Limewire, and Morpheus.

“Unfortunately,” says Cara Duckworth, Director of Communications for the RIAA “too many students continue to ignore the law and get music from illegal services like Limewire that do not invest a penny in nurturing music or compensating the artists, labels and the thousands of behind the scenes workers bringing music to the public.”

Recipients of the pre-litigation letters are offered a chance to avoid a lawsuit from the recording industry by settling out of court for a reduced fee. Of the 5,005 letters that the RIAA has sent in previous rounds, over 2,300 recipients have opted to settle and avoid a lawsuit. Others choose to challenge the music industry, or do not know they have been named when some universities refuse to identify their students who have engaged in alleged file sharing.

Student have 20 days from receiving the letters to decide if they will settle with the music industry out of court, or attempt a potentially costly and drawn out court battle.

This brings the total of pre-litigation letters sent specifically to college students to 5,406 since February of last year.

According to the Institute for Policy Innovation, a think tank based in Texas, global theft of sound recordings cost the U.S. economy $12.5 billion in lost revenue and more than 71,000 jobs and $2 billion in wages to U.S. workers per year. While this statistic is widely disputed by critics, the RIAA uses it to back up what it calls its “deterrence” program.

The recording industry also cites a 2006 survey by the market research firm Student Monitor that more than half of college students download music and movies illegally and that in 2006, according to another market research firm, NPD, college students alone accounted for more than 1.3 billion illegal music downloads.

If you have been named by the RIAA and would like to talk about your experience, contact us at newseditor@uweekly.com. Anonymity is guaranteed.

Originally Published: February 27, 2008

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