Colleges Fed Up with Cost of RIAA Pre-litigation Letters

In the article “Colleges push back against RIAA's methods,” from eSchool News,” Many universities say helping the recording industry track down students is taking too much time and too many resources.

For years, the RIAA has blackmailed moms, dads, kids and grandparents into paying them settle fines of $2000 to $5000 so they won’t have to face long litigation fees against possible file sharing of copyrighted materials. That’s about to change when it comes to college students.

Administrators and IT chiefs at public universities nationwide say the recording industry's search for students accused of online piracy is cutting into their faculty's work day. In recent months, some universities have refused to forward "pre-litigation" letters to students offering them a settlement to avoid further legal action from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Forwarding these documents is not a legal responsibility of the college, administrators say. This is between the recording industry and the people who may be violating their copyrights," said Brian Rust, marketing manager of the University of Wisconsin at Madison's Department of Information Technology.

Filtering or monitoring technologies designed to spot incidents of illegal downloads have forced many colleges to assign full-time employees the job of tracking down the IP addresses of network users who might have violated copyright laws.

Wisconsin officials said students found to have downloaded music illegally are not booted off the school's network automatically. Rust, the university's IT marketing manager, said "[The RIAA] would lead you to believe that is because our institution has an increase in copyright violations," he said. "We feel that it's due to their increasing efforts to scan the networks and send out notices." University officials said pre-litigation letters are mailed to schools at an alarming pace during final exams. That is no accident, Rust said. In the midst of cramming and finishing last-minute term papers, he said, students are more likely to "settle and pay their money," as the pre-litigation documents suggest. Rust added that students who receive a letter forwarded from a university office might be misled into believing the college is recommending a settlement.

The RIAA has bullied the public too long, and have only to release more of their archives to make useless the use of peer to peer networks, which are used to find the hard to find recorded material. Sampling new music with longer segments, perhaps 1 minute as opposed to the current 30 seconds, would help seekers get a better feel for the music. But then, that would be the easy solution, and not rake in the extra dollars with pre-settlement fees.