The Chronicle

Issue date: 11/8/07 Section: Columns
Last update: 11/8/07 at 7:17 AM EST

Elliott Wolf

In May, the Recording Industry Association of America sent 28 subpoenas to the Office of Information Technology, seeking personal information on students whose computers were monitored distributing allegedly copyrighted material on peer-to-peer file-sharing systems.

Over the summer, in stages, the Office of Legal Counsel complied.

It first relayed "prelitigation notices" to the 12 students identified in the University's logs as the owners of the computers whose IP addresses were identified in the subpoenas. The students were given the option of paying an out-of-court settlement of approximately $3,000 or spending potentially much more defending themselves against a civil copyright infringement suit. Six students chose to reveal themselves to the RIAA and settled.

Several months later, the counsel's office revealed the names and other personal identifying information of the six who refused to settle, subjecting them to litigation and effectively throwing them under a very large bus driven by a very drunk driver.

These actions are extremely problematic for several reasons:

The RIAA and its Hollywood counterpart, the Motion Picture Association of America, use automated programs to scour the Internet for material that might be copyrighted by those they represent. These programs have initiated legal threats after erroneously flagging free software, academic papers and other items that happen to be contained in files named similarly to any one of tens of thousands of song titles, band names, movie titles and television series claimed as copyrighted by the entertainment industry.

If the programs find a truly offending file, there is still no guarantee that the computer IP address submitted to the University corresponds in the University's logs to the name of the person actually responsible for it. Adept users can subsume an address from another person, guests can use computers tied to registered users and viruses can take over computers to distribute copyrighted material without the knowledge of the owner. Last week, the University of Oregon refused to comply with 17 subpoenas because there was no way to verify "whether the content was accessed by the individual assigned that user name or by someone else using the computer associated with the user name," according to Dale Smith, Oregon's director of network services.

And even if said user(s) distributed said copyrighted work(s), there are numerous questions surrounding the illegality of sharing material online, the legality of the RIAA's enforcement efforts and universities' responsibility to protect students' privacy rights under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

Continued...

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