Twenty-six students have received pre-litigation letters from the Recording Industry Association of America as part of its most recent effort to combat illegal file sharing.
"We have received the new batch of settlement letters and my recollection is that we were able to pass those on to all but one [of the students]," said Larry Moneta, vice president for student affairs.
This is not the first time the RIAA has sent letters to Duke. Last May, 35 notices were sent. Moneta said the University does not reveal students' names to the RIAA except in cases where it receives a subpoena ordering it to do so.
Among the students receiving a notice was sophomore Max Altman. The Office of Information Technology forwarded him an e-mail from the RIAA about two weeks ago. He then received a letter in the mail this Monday.
He said the letter offered him the options of settling with the RIAA by paying $4,000 or facing a potential $500,000 lawsuit.
A copy of the form letter provided to The Chronicle by the RIAA threatens the students with lawsuits if they do not reply within 20 days of the date of the letter.
"You could just write them a check for $4,000 right now and be done with it," Altman said. "Don't have to deal with any lawyers, don't have to deal with anything. I'm not going to choose to do that."
He added that he plans to hire a lawyer and believes he has a strong chance of winning.
In light of the legal battle he now faces, Altman said he wonders whether Duke could have done more to keep him out of the RIAA's spotlight.
"I would like to think they could have done more, but I don't know what they could have done," he said.
The University is currently refining its procedure for responding to RIAA notices and plans to send a letter to students in January explaining them, Moneta said. This approach has been developed in consultation with Tracy Futhey, vice president for information technology, and Associate University Counsel Henry Cuthbert.
"What we're trying to do is find the appropriate middle ground so that we're neither casting our students to the vagaries of external litigation nor insulating them from the consequences," Moneta said.
The legality of these subpoenas has not been contested by any school, except the University of Oregon. Individual students, however, have sought to quash the RIAA subpoenas, said Stephen Robertson, the lawyer for eight North Carolina State University students currently attempting to stop RIAA attempts to discover their identities.
He said the RIAA's methods are overbearing and often do not result in the correct identification of the people who are, in fact, sharing copyrighted music.
The letters sent to Duke by the RIAA identify students by their computer IP addresses, and OIT is then responsible for matching the numbers with student names. OIT only maintains two weeks of the logs used to make the matches, Futhey said.
Therefore, OIT is not always able to forward RIAA letters to students, as was the case with one letter in the latest batch, Moneta said.
Altman said he believes this process is susceptible to error and added that this gives him grounds for contesting the lawsuit.
Moneta said Duke's ultimate goal is to reduce the number of students sharing copyrighted files through an education campaign.
"It's not clear to me that the problem will be resolved by an expansion of litigation," he said. "Our approach to the whole notion of downloading tends to be preventative and not reactive."
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