The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been making aggressive use of its new pre-litigation settlement offers in an attempt to combat online file sharing by college students.
These offers take the form of letters mailed to colleges and universities and give students with Internet Protocol (IP) addresses connected to illegal sharing the chance to settle out of court with the RIAA.
Students who don't settle can face a lawsuit and a higher fee compared to those who accept the offers.
The RIAA unveiled these offers in February. According to an April 11 press release from the RIAA, 1,318 pre-litigation letters had already been sent by that time. None of them went to Tufts.
In the third and latest wave, also sent out on April 11, 21 schools, including Brown University, Cornell University, Colby College, the University of New Hampshire, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Rochester received a total of 413 letters.
The letters have been sent to the schools rather than individual students because the RIAA only has access to the IP addresses of the violators. These addresses specify the college or university, but not the identity, of each student.
Administrators at schools who received the most recent offers had different experiences with them.
"We received 19 settlement letters that RIAA has asked us to forward to students," Simeon Moss, the director of the Press Relations Office at Cornell University, said in an e-mail. As of Sunday, he that Cornell planed to forward the letters to the students as the RIAA requested.
But at Colby College, to which five letters were sent, administrators ran into a roadblock because they, like the RIAA, were unable to match students with IP addresses. "Colby cannot identify the specific individuals concerned because it is not our policy to retain logs of IP addresses and activity for indefinite amounts of time," Associate Vice President and Director of Communications Stephen Heacock said in an e-mail.
But he said that the letters were passed along to the community, advising anyone involved with illegal file sharing to cease and desist immediately.
Colby is also recommending that "anyone recognizing that he or she might be the subject of any RIAA actions consult an attorney," according to Heacock.
In the wake of the RIAA's more aggressive approach, universities have also encouraged students to seek legal means of obtaining files.
At Tufts, students can use Ruckus, a legal downloading service accessible to all students with a college e-mail address.
But it is still unclear how successful the RIAA's campaign will be in reforming college students' habits.
"At this early stage, it is hard to gauge if the letters and any settlements they generate will have an effect on file-sharing behavior," Heacock said.
Tufts OnLine Supervisor Judi Rennie agreed, but added that at the very least, the campaign has generated a lot of press.
"It is too soon to tell if the RIAA's aggressive stance will be successful, but it has certainly got the attention of college campuses nationwide," she said in an e-mail. "It is clear that they feel it is a serious problem and it's likely that they will continue to be aggressive with their efforts until they are satisfied with the results."
While Tufts has not received any settlement offers, Rennie said that at this point "most universities are expecting that they will receive letters."
The RIAA will continue to release more letters on a rolling basis.
