News

RIAA shifts prosecution away from individual user

In print | January 22, 2009

The Recording Industry Association of America announced last month that it would stop prosecuting individuals for pirating copyrighted music, hoping that working with commercial Internet service providers will prove to be a more effective way of preventing illegal file-sharing.

Under their new policy, if the RIAA suspects that someone is illegally downloading or sharing music, the trade group will contact that individual’s Internet Service Provider. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, ISPs will then execute what the RIAA is calling a “graduated-response program” — the ISP will first issue warnings to suspected offenders via e-mail, and if after multiple warnings, these users fail to stop file-sharing their accounts could be suspended.

The Wall Street Journal reported in December that the RIAA claims to have reached deals with major ISPs but is not willing to say which ones.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the new program is supposed to deal with commercial ISPs, not colleges, because many schools already have similar response systems in place. The RIAA will still send notices of copyright infringement to colleges, but since they have stopped actively pursuing lawsuits, the group will not send any new pre-litigation letters.

The RIAA still reserves the right to prosecute the most egregious file-sharers, a threshold defined by the PC Journal as downloading 5,000 to 6,000 songs a month.

Since 2003, the RIAA has filed lawsuits against about 35,000 individuals for as much as $150,000 per pirated song. The trade group plans on continuing all outstanding lawsuits.

But while some find the RIAA’s move a radical change in policy, Swarthmore’s Chief Information Technology Officer Gayle Barton said that she doesn’t foresee it having a significant effect on the college.

“By law, we have to make our best effort to prevent file-sharing,” Barton said. “Our policy was driven by the law. Them changing their business practices doesn’t change our policy.”

And considering how recently the RIAA made this announcement, Barton said, it’s still “unclear” what will happen.

“They’re not going to stop trying to enforce copyright law or trying to make sure that they can protect their income stream,” she said. “What are they going to do instead? Because it’s not like they don’t care.”

Orion Sauter ’11, a public area consultant for ITS, said that though the RIAA’s decision “might seem like a nice ideological idea,” he’s “not sure it makes a difference” because the school is still expected to prevent illegal file-sharing. In fact, the bar has been raised for college’s enforcement of copyright laws, said Sauter and Barton.

This past Fall, the Higher Educational Opportunity Act was passed, forcing schools with any federal funding to “effectively combat” illegal file-sharing across campus and “to detect and punish” any known instances of it. Barton met with the deans in the fall to work on modifying the school’s policy accordingly and to draft a campus-wide e-mail addressing the subject.

“The changes to policy [were] really only to be sure that our response to take down notices was not only fair to students, but also strong enough to convey how serious a matter this is becoming — the risks such actions by students place on themselves and on the college,” Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Garikai Campbell said in an e-mail.

While the RIAA has not brought any lawsuits against Swarthmore students in recent years, Barton said that there have been 31 notices from trade groups informing the school of piracy, 16 of which were from the RIAA. In these instances, the school must identify the computer referred to in the notice, write to the owner of that computer and block him or her from the network until illegal activity stops.

The RIAA’s decision, however, shows that the recording industry has realized their current policies do not appeal to the consumers’ hunger for instant access to entertainment, Barton said.
“I think this whole market is evolving, and the entertainment industry will discover how to make money,” she said. “We’re getting to have more choices. I think the entertainment industry is learning new ways [to appeal to consumers].”

Two weeks ago, for example, Apple announced a major revision in the copy protection policies for music purchased from its popular iTunes Store. Namely, major music labels are allowing Apple to sell music free of digital rights management, a lock used by iTunes in the past to prevent music from being shared outside the bounds of what the RIAA considers “fair use.”

Moreover, Apple has announced that it is changing its pricing structure for music on iTunes, affording labels greater flexibility in determining how much customers will pay for song downloads. This change could make users more drawn to legal downloading over illegal downloading, said Barton.
There have been other, equally significant changes taking place in how music is sold over the Internet. For example, with the release of the album “In Rainbows,” Radiohead paved the way for “pay-as-you-like” albums, giving fans the power to choose the price of downloads and, in Radiohead’s case, giving the artist a sustainable profit.

But there may be even more drastic changes in the works. On Monday, the BBC reported that the music industry might force ISPs to pay for music and then provide that music to subscribers. Barton said in an e-mail that she thinks this is the “real next step for the music industry.”

“They don’t want to go after people one at a time,” she said. “They want a whole new distribution channel to be set up and, at the expense of the ISP, passed along to the customers.”These changes could have consequences, though. Apple’s change is intended to allow individuals greater freedom to move their music between different devices, not between different people, said Barton.

If the music industry chooses to force ISPs to pay for music, it “would be an expensive and time consuming service to set up and maintain, and it would have a serious impact on our ability to provide College-related technology support and services,” Barton said.

“I think it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out,” Barton said.