RIAA to Send 400 Pre-Suit Offers Monthly to Alleged Campus Infringers
Hundreds of students will get taken to school each month on copyright law and financial incentives, in a larger RIAA campaign to spur settlements before suing for illegal file- sharing. Details of the quick-settlement plan pitched to commercial ISPs was recently leaked and drew criticism as a legal end-run (WID Feb 15 p4), but details on university offers were missing. RIAA will make students pre-suit settlement offers on a different schedule -- 400 at various schools monthly -- than those recently offered to commercial ISP customers, which go out on a “rolling basis,” said RIAA Gen. Counsel Steve Marks in a press conference Wed.
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Officials declined to put a dollar value on settlement sums proposed in the pre-suit option, but Marks called them “substantially less than what people are paying now” following John Doe suits. Occasional reports of individual settlements put the typical figure at $3,000-5,000.
RIAA will send letters to each school, asking that they be forwarded to students matching traced IP addresses. Those who answer within 20 calendar days asking to settle will get discounts -- and sidestep civil court records, Marks said: “We view this as a win-win-win that advances everybody’s interests.” RIAA is reversing its litigation ratio, suing more students at fewer schools per round to “drive home the message,” selecting targets at random, Marks said. The campaign started with 20-50 letters to students at 13 schools: Ariz. State U., Marshall U., N.C. State U., N. Dakota State U., Northern Ill. U., Ohio U., Syracuse U., U. of Mass.-Amherst, U. of Neb.-Lincoln, U. of S. Fla., U. of Southern Cal., U. of Tenn.-Knoxville and U. of Tex.-Austin.
“Virtually no one… can claim not to know” that sharing copyrighted files is illegal, yet more than 1/2 of college students download illicitly, said RIAA Pres. Cary Sherman, citing a study by the Intellectual Property Institute at the U. of Richmond Law School. The group also cited NPD research that college students get 1/4 of their music via illicit sharing, compared to 16% of the remaining population. Schools need to “step up and accept responsibility” for educating students on copyright and offering alternatives, such as paid music services like Ruckus funded via student fees, he said. In an offhand remark Sherman said campus-town music stores are fast disappearing, implicitly blaming campus piracy, but a spokeswoman later told us this was anecdotal, not based on a study like the Richmond piracy survey.
Schools can blunt file-sharing with “network technical solutions,” Sherman said, citing startup Red Lambda and Audible Magic, the latter well-known as MySpace’s antipiracy tool (WID Feb 13 p5) and, reportedly, soon to see use by YouTube. The technologies guard student privacy while blocking opportunities for piracy, he said, calling Audible Magic’s tools “incredible effective.”
But some schools aren’t biting, due mainly to the cost of filtering, Sherman told us. “Network architecture varies” school to school, so implementing a commercial product is more difficult than software tailored to an institution, he said. Audible Magic couldn’t be reached to describe any efforts to develop software for a broad array of network architectures.
A satisfactory solution may be simply blocking P2P protocols; they are “technically and theoretically capable” of carrying noninfringing traffic, but in practice no one is sharing “Shakespeare’s sonnets,” Sherman said. Red Lambda grew out of a U. of Fla. project that “essentially eliminated” online piracy at that school through blocking, he said. RIAA Chmn. Mitch Bainwol added that the university saved money on bandwidth. More schools are “finding interest” in filtering or protocol blocking, Sherman said, declining to estimate how many schools use or plan to use antipiracy tools.