Recording industry misses point with student attacks

To the Editor:
In his article (“Brown ensnared in national music-sharing dispute,” Dec. 31), David Ortiz captured the predicament most institutions of higher education find themselves in when they are asked to be the “copyright police” by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
The RIAA has used its “pre-litigation” letters as a form of extortion to force consumers to succumb to the legal threat of expensive lawsuits by paying up without the RIAA ever having to produce a shred of legal evidence. The schools feel obligated to inform the students to allow them to make the choice of pay a little now, or face the threat of paying a lot later.
But the RIAA’s actions are those of desperation.
According to an article by Nate Anderson in the on-line journal ARS Technica, the University of Oregon is fighting back on behalf of its students.
“Writing in … The New York Times, columnist Adam Liptak covered the case and pointed out [that Portland State University] had turned over such information back in 2004, but that it had done so on two roommates, since the university couldn’t tell which of their computers had been used. The RIAA tried to get the non-offending student to settle for $4,500. The girl’s mother told Liptak that the process was ‘basically extortion.’ The lawsuit filed against the girl was later dropped.”
Liptak’s own take on the situation is worth quoting because of what it indicates about mainstream reaction to the RIAA’s legal campaign.
“No one should shed tears for people who steal music and have to face the consequences,” he wrote. “But it is nonetheless heartening to see a university decline to become the industry’s police officer and instead to defend the privacy of its students.”
Cara Duckworth, a spokesperson for the RIAA, claims the majority of their woes are caused by students who utilize robust college computer networks to conduct their piracy. This is typical RIAA rhetoric.
The article states 1.3 billion songs were downloaded illegally by college students. It fails to note that less than 20 percent of college students actually live on campus. So while the RIAA targets students in college residence halls, the vast majority of piracy is occurring over broadband links in people’s homes, not in the dorm room.
In Rhode Island, all college students have the ability to use a legal music service called RUCKUS. Last year more than 20,000 college students in Rhode Island downloaded more than 8.6 million songs – completely legally.
The RIAA also sputters about how it is the responsibility of colleges to teach their students about the moral and ethical issues of illegally downloading music.
A recent survey by Brandeis University of 80 colleges found that more than 68 percent do provide education to their students about copyrights and piracy. A full 57 percent of those respondents actually block all peer-to-peer network traffic.
Yet I have never seen an ad on MTV sponsored by the RIAA educating the youth of America about illegal music sharing. I find the RIAA’s stance that it is higher education’s responsibility to educate people who are coming to our campuses already well-versed in how to pirate music when the RIAA has no educational effort underway to teach kids before they get to college.
The Motley Fool has issued a report warning investors away from the music industry, concluding with: “… a good sign of a dying industry … is when it would rather litigate than innovate, signaling a potential destroyer of value.”
Or as Lawrence Lessig once said, “The milk of innovation does not come from cash cows.”