Freshman Elliot Wolf plans to challenge the Motion Picture Association of America's claims that he has illegally downloaded television shows.
When freshman Elliott Wolf opened his e-mail last week and found a forwarded note from the Motion Picture Association of America, he didn’t think much of it. Sure, he had downloaded some television shows, but he didn’t mind that the Office of Information Technology was telling him the industry wanted him to stop. He did.
But when he opened his e-mail this week to find another note from the MPAA, he wasn’t sure what to think. The warning, which applied to TV shows from weeks earlier, was the same as the first, but this time Wolf was armed with a slew of research.
He was willing to quit sharing his files over the Internet because, as he said, “it’s just not worth it.” But the prospect of a legal fight with the MPAA intrigued him.
“What the MPAA is yelling at me about, at Duke about, is really ambiguous,” Wolf said.
Because the MPAA warning is about television shows, which are initially broadcast free of charge, Wolf thinks the industry is on questionable legal ground. He has contacted independent activist groups to help him figure out if the same court rulings that made VCRs legal in the 1980s protect downloading.
Ren Bucholz, activism coordinator for the advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the copyright law that governs file sharing cases has not caught up with technology. Whether file sharing is legal at both individual and large-scale levels depends on interpretation of “fair use” exceptions in copyright laws.
“As far as personal file sharing and copying a television show, there isn’t something in the law that gets you off the hook right away,” Bucholz said. “The argument is that they may have been broadcast for free in the first place, but they may not remain free.”
In the absence of a clear legal course, the industry often sends “cease and desist” requests to people they find trafficking files.
OIT receives about 300 to 400 warnings from the recording and movie industries each year, said Chris Cramer, information technology security officer. It then forwards the messages to the people accused to violating copyright law. Whereas most allegations used to come from the Recording Industry Association of America, Cramer said a majority now concern movies and television.
In mid-November, the MPAA filed an undisclosed number of lawsuits against multiple individuals who were only identified by their IP addresses, which serve as computer identification codes. Following the same model the RIAA used, the studios said they will identify the individual defendants at a later date.
Cramer said none of the IP addresses named in lawsuits have belonged to Duke community members.
These lawsuits encountered resistance Nov. 23 when a federal judge in California ruled that individual lawsuits must be filed for each unnamed defendant.
Officials from the MPAA did not return repeated phone calls.
Most of the lawsuits so far, from both the RIAA and the MPAA, have been filed against people who upload copyrighted information, rather than people who download it. OIT includes instructions on its website about how to prevent uploading while using file sharing sites.
“Practically speaking, it would be difficult to catch people who have disabled uploading, whether or not you are violating copyright law.” Cramer said.
The University has never tracked downloads or person-to-person file transfers and does not disclose the names of alleged violators without a subpoena, Cramer said. “Since these are things that are alleged, there is no real reason to turn over the names of the alleged people,” he said.
The policy is one that Wolf, like many other Duke students, is grateful for. In practice, it prevents the MPAA from linking Wolf to his address and becoming an easy target for a lawsuit.
So as Wolf attempts to argue for downloading, he is keeping specific details of the MPAA’s accusations, such as what shows he downloaded, quiet. “I guess I’ll go as far as I can without telling them my identity,” he said. “Because if I become the one person who gets identified, then WHEW.”
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