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NEWS
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 30, 2008
Lacey Fisher, Garden City junior, has few songs in her iTunes library, thanks to a lawsuit filed against her by the music industry. Fisher, an RA t at Corbin Hall, erased all the music on her computer after being sued. The other RAs at Corbin bought her an iTunes gift card to help re build her collection.
Jon Goerina/KANSAN
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Doe No. 10 showed the e-mail to a friend's father, who told him it might be a hoax. Then, he took it to Legal Services for Students, where an attorney told him the record companies were trying to discover his identity and file a lawsuit against him.
He immediately feared that the release of his identity as a known copyright infringer could hurt his chances of finding a mechanical engineering job after graduating.
"I was pretty crushed," he said.
But Doe No. 10 and Fisher had to overcome their shock that the recording industry was after them, and fast. They each had until March 5, about
"I think I deserved to get in trouble for it. I don't know if getting charged $4,000 is exactly justice."
A NATIONWIDE BATTLE
University to reveal identities, and the judge granted the request in October. The University received a subpoena in February and, more than six months after first learning of the lawsuits, told the 13 students for the first time that they were being sued. By then, the RIAA's settlement offer had risen from $3,000 to $4,000.
three weeks later, to choose their next step: Settle with the RIAA now, or hire a lawyer and battle a multibillion-dollar industry in court.
Sweiring to herself out of shock and frustration, Fisher picked up the phone and called her mother.
Since February 2007, the RIAA — which represents record companies that produce about 90 percent of U.S. music sales — has sent about 5,400 pre-lawsuit letters to students it accuses of infringing music copyrights while using university Internet networks. The letters warn their targets of an impending copyright infringement lawsuit and give a deadline for the accused file-sharer to settle with the RIAA before it files the suit.
Lacey Fisher, John Doe No. 10 and the 11 other current and former KU students swept up in the record industry's lawsuits are targets in a campaign by the RIAA to deter campus copyright infringers by suing small groups of students at colleges nationwide.
RIAA spokeswoman Liz Kennedy said the RIAA was conducting the lawsuit campaign to
The students can settle for about $3,000 before the RIAA files a lawsuit, according to several university attorneys around the country who have met with students targeted in the campaign.
JOHN DOE NO. 10
Wichita sophomore
At that point, the RIAA knows only the Internet Protocol, or IP addresses of accused copyright infringers. An IP address is an identification number for a computer accessing the Internet. The RIAA asks the schools to identify the targeted people by their IP addresses and send the letters on to them.
The University did not forward the letters on to the targeted students when it first received them in Summer 2007.
Consequently, in September, the record companies filed the "John Doe" lawsuits and requested a court order to require the
deter college students who illegally download music at high rates. She pointed to studies such as one from the market research company NPD in 2006 that found that college students, who made up
only 10 percent of the general population, made up 28 percent of the people using file-sharing networks. The company also found that college students made more than 1.3 billion illegal downloads in 2006.
Kennedy said the RIAA wanted to convince students that downloading music for free was not worth the risk of an expensive settlement.
ASTORY TO TELL
Fisher wasted no time telling her story to friends, family and nearly anyone who would listen, she said.
"I just don't want to see it happen to everybody else" she said.
Many of Fisher's family and friends, including avid music downloaders, stopped downloading music from file-sharing services after she told them about her run-in with the recording industry, she said.
She told her boss at Corbin about her problem, as well as the other RAs. The RAs bought her an iTunes music store gift card to help her restock her music collection, which she had erased after being sued, she said.
She called a meeting for students living on her floor and told them about her legal troubles. She said their shocked faces showed they got the RIAA's message: This could happen to anyone who illegally downloads.
When Fisher called her mother immediately after she read the law-suit e-mail, she heard the expected "I told you so."
But both her parents sympathized with her bad luck in being one of the few among millions of illegal downloaders forced to pay up, she said.
"It got everybody pretty shook up" she said.
"You kind of always think that, yeah, right, you're not going to get sued for music downloads," Fisher said. "There's people doing
zero tolerance?
Last summer, the University announced a new zero-tolerance policy for students caught illegally file-sharing on the KU network. However, the new policy has not been as strict as it may have seemed then.
Along with filing copyright infringement lawsuits, the RIAA and other groups send notices to colleges and universities telling them an Internet user has been caught file-sharing, and the schools can decide how to react to the notices. The new zero-tolerance policy said that any student mentioned in one of these notices would have his or her Internet connection shut off.
But Jane Tuttle, assistant to the vice provost for student success, said most students who have been caught have been able to appeal and restore their connections. She said she wanted the offending students to remove the files they were caught sharing and
Stacey Pope, Topeka sophomore, said she was caught sharing an Avril Lavigne song in Lewis Hall earlier this year but was able to get her Internet restored with an appeal. She said she had downloaded in the residence halls because she thought the University was still using its old three-strikes policy. She said her roommate got caught file-sharing the previous year, and she just had to take an online quiz.
make sure that the University would not receive a notice about them again.
Fisher said she hadn't downloaded as much music as some of her friends, although she'd started using file-sharing services in eighth or ninth grade.
far worse things."
Tuttle said that, as of March 31, the University had denied only two of the 116 students who had appealed to reconnect their Internet under the zero-tolerance policy. The policy began Aug. 1.
Doe No. 10 said he felt intimidated by the possibility of an RIAA lawsuit. Like most college students, he said he had never had any legal trouble before, especially against a "very large, very rich opposition" such as the RIAA.
The settlement cost would have been $3,000 — $1,000 less — if it weren't for the University's decision last summer to stay out of the conflict between its students and the record companies.
"I found out the punishment just wasn't severe at all," Pope said. "But then they cracked down on it this year."
With the March 5 deadline approaching fast, Fisher asked her lawyer what she should do, and he told her she should settle out of court, avoiding court fees, lawyer costs and the possible release of her name and other private information.
John Doe No. 10 said he usually kept his LimeWire music folder small, and court documents showed the RIAA detected him sharing 114 songs, roughly the contents of 10 CDs. He said he would sometimes go out and buy the music he had downloaded if he liked it.
Doe No. 10 got the same advice from his lawyer: settle.
They both had to pay $4,000 — no small sum for someone getting by on an RA's pay of a $40 check every two weeks.
A COSTLY CHOICE
When the University did not forward the RIAA's first letters to the lawsuit targets, the record companies filed lawsuits against the people who had used the IP
The K. jumps after it Doe" lawsuits, according to attorneys from several universities from around the country. The University did not give its students a chance to settle before they became "John Does," costing them about $1,000 each.
addresses, calling them "John Does" because it didn't know their names.
The RIAA's settlement offer jumps after it has filed "John
"Our viewpoint is that there needs to be a due process," Cohen said. "If they want that information, go to court."
John Doe No. 10 said he wished the University had told him about the pending lawsuit against him when it first found out about it in July or August.
"If they get something from an outside source that deals with students, the students should be one of the first to know," he said. "I mean, it's directly affecting them."
Todd Cohen, director of University Relations, said the University decided not to forward the original letters last summer based on the advice of its attorneys in the office of the general counsel.
Cohen said other universities had also refused to forward the letters, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He said the record companies tried to get universities to identify lawsuit targets for them in an attempt to save time and money, and the University decided it should not act as the RIAA's agent.
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Texas, each of which has received more than 150 of the RIAA's lawsuit warning letters, both immediately forwarded the letters on to their students.
Attorney Raymond Schifflett, director of student legal services at Texas, who has advised many students who've been RIAA lawsuit targets, said it was in the best interest of students for universities to forward the RIAA's letters.
"You kind of always think that, yeah, right, you're not going to get sued for music downloads. There's people doing far worse things."
"It sounds noble on the front end, like, 'We're going to protect your privacy,' until you've realized you've suddenly lost a thousand dollars," Schiflett said. "Then it's not so nobel."
Tom Keefe, an attorney in Nebraska's student legal services department, agreed that forwarding the pre-lawsuit letters was the better choice for students targeted by the RIAA. He said this gave students more time to decide what to do, along with an opportunity for a cheaper settlement.
Patrick Knorr, general manager of private Internet service provider Sunflower Broadband in Lawrence, said Sunflower would "absolutely" forward a pre-lawsuit letter to one of its customers, as long as it was confident that it could correctly identify the user being targeted. Knorr said this would be in the
LACEY FISHER
Garden City junior
best interest of the customer.
Fisher said she received an e-mail from the University earlier in the school year telling her she'd been detected illegally sharing
music files, but it did not tell her she was about to be sued.
She said she wished the University had considered her interests more in its decision.
"It's sort of shocking, because I kind of feel like they would rather protect the University as a whole than their students individually," Fisher said.
James Potterff, University general counsel, declined to comment on the advice his office gave to the University.
Marlesa Roney, vice provost for student success, who participated in the decision to act on attorneys' advice and not forward the letters, said she felt bad for the students who got caught by the RIAA, but the University had tried to do what was best.
Tracy Mitrano, information technology director at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., said the
"In a situation like this, sometimes there isn't an answer that meets everyone's needs in the best way possible," Roney said.
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what could you get for $4,000?
Some things you could buy for $4,000 — the amount seven students have paid the music industry to avoid copyright infringement lawsuits — to get more music in your life:
X260
260 music CDs, at an aver age price of $15
+ 3,500 songs
A 32-gigabyte iPod Touch ($500 plus tax), plus about 3,500 songs from the iTunes store for $.99 each
A PlayStation 3 system ($400), the games "Guitar Hero III" ($100) and "Rock Band" ($170), and a top-of-the-line Bose home theater system ($3,000)
A trip for you and three friends to see Kanye West, Radiohead and more than 100 other bands perform at the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago in August, including tickets to all three days of the festival ($820); airfare, hotel and a rental car ($1,100 total); plus about $500 spending money for each person.
Sources: BestBuy.com, Lollapaloza.com, Priceline.com