You Got Served

DE-FILED: Though Penn and Drexel are still waiting, Villanova's case has already been ruled on -- the university must identify nine John Does for the RIAA.
Photo By: Michael T. Regan

The RIAA asks local colleges to hand over the names of illegal music downloaders.

by Julia Zhou

Alanis (not her real name) never did get to see Against the Ropes, but trying to almost got her knocked out instead. The University of Pennsylvania junior has been downloading illegally since high school. The habit only heightened in college. "High-speed ethernet amazed me," she says. "I used Kazaa K++ to download lots of movies and songs. Tons of them." She never once paid for music.

In April, she discovered BitTorrent on www.supernova.org. Unlike Kazaa, it allows users to download simultaneously from many sources by turning each downloading computer into an uploading computer as well. Result: almost instantaneous transfers. The day she found BitTorrent, Alanis downloaded part of Against the Ropes and some episodes of Sex in the City.

Two days later, Penn forwarded her a warning from Paramount Pictures. "A very, very scary letter full of legal terms," Alanis says.

"I threw away all of my [burned] CDs — there were a lot — deleted all of the music and videos on my computer, and basically reformatted my computer, since I had heard the university sometimes comes and checks your computer."

Still, she's lucky. In the latest round of lawsuits by the Recording Industry of America Association, three Philadelphia universities — Penn, Drexel and Villanova — are being subpoenaed. Nationwide, 32 other universities are in the same position. By what's called a "motion for expedited discovery," the RIAA wants these schools to hand over names of certain students believed to be downloading.

According to spokesman Jonathan Lamy, the RIAA finds music pirates the same way those downloaders find music — by going on peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa, Soulseek and Supernova. Each targeted user has 900 illegally obtained songs, on average.

"We send a letter to the individual offering them an opportunity to settle the case before it goes any further," Lamy says. "The majority of people are interested in settling."

Though Penn and Drexel are still waiting, Villanova's case has already been ruled on — the university must identify nine John Does for the RIAA.

If that number seems awfully low, it's because the RIAA isn't looking to recover lost profits through these lawsuits. Though students settle for an average of $3,000 each, "the idea here is to send a message of deterrence to let people know that this action is illegal and there can be real consequences," Lamy says.

"Ultimately the only thing that gets people to change their behavior is the threat of consequences," he adds.

University officials don't agree. Laure Ergin, associate general counsel for Drexel, calls the lawsuits "a shame." "Educating would be a far better approach to this than suing the students," she says. General counsels at Penn and Villanova did not return repeated calls for comment.

Not all musicians are on the RIAA's side either. In a survey conducted earlier this year by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 60 percent of musicians and songwriters polled did not expect the lawsuits to actually benefit them.

Technology guru and Penn professor Dave Farber doesn't even believe the RIAA's claims of annually losing $4.2 billion worldwide to illegal downloading. "I don't think it's as dramatic," he says. Farber likened the lawsuits to using a nuclear weapon to wipe out cockroaches. "You wipe out a lot of other things too."

The metaphor may go further than he intended — cockroaches are one of the only creatures expected to survive a nuclear fallout. Is the same true for downloaders and lawsuits?

"I would say 100 percent of my friends download," says Alanis. "Since the RIAA and the movie companies are catching people, I've seen it decrease to 99 percent."

Kristin Thomson, co-founder of Future of Music, a nonprofit dedicated to getting artists their deserved compensation, says that although some people deleted their illegal files, others say the risk of being caught is "so low that they do what they've always done."

She agrees with the RIAA in principle but refuses to take a stand on the lawsuits, insisting the issue is more complex. Thomson likes the idea of "alternate compensation systems," such as taxing devices that allow for filesharing — blank CDs, for example.

The beauty of ACS, says Thomson, is that it recognizes peer-to-peer is not going away. "You can't squash this technology. You can't put it back in the bag," Thomson says.

For one student, peer to peer is over. Alanis says she hasn't used Kazaa since the warning and now buys music online at iTunes.

"I'm staying clean," she says. "Although there are mad cravings sometimes, since you know it's just one click away from a free download."