A number of Tufts students have recently been affected by the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) pre-litigation settlement offers.
These offers, which were unveiled in February, give students who have engaged in illegal peer-to-peer file sharing the chance to settle with the RIAA. If they do not settle, they recording industry will take legal action against them.
The RIAA has sent out around 3,000 of these letters, although until May, none of them had gone to Tufts. Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman confirmed, however, that Tufts received 15 of them in May asking students to settle for fees ranging from $3,500 to $5,000.
A more recent wave of letters also affected Tufts as four more made their way to campus on Friday.
Although the RIAA cannot immediately identify students illegally sharing files on the Internet, it can log their Internet protocol (IP) addresses. In the pre-litigation letters, the RIAA simply indicates an IP address and asks the university to find the specific student.
Reitman is the administrator in charge of contacting the students who match the IP addresses. He tells them about the letters and informs them of the option of paying the fine through fine a Web site.
Of the 15 students affected in May, two did not settle with the RIAA, and the university eventually received subpoenas compelling the administration to turn over their names.
Prior to that, the last time Tufts received subpoenas from the RIAA was in 2005, before pre-litigation settlement offers were used. At that time, the university received six subpoenas. Under current policy, however, subpoenas are not sent unless students decline to settle after receiving pre-litigation offers.
Reitman said that this new policy has been cost-effective for the recording industry. "It costs money to get a subpoena; it's less costly to send a pre-litigation notice," he said.
While the RIAA has been aggressive with these letters, some are not convinced that they will be effective. One student, whose name has been withheld because he admitted to downloading illegally, said that the campaign will not change his behavior.
"It's intimidating at first, but it's the kind of thing where people have been talking about it, [but] I don't know anyone who's been affected by it, so I'm not personally scared by it," he said. "It's exactly the sort of situation where it seems like it's not going to happen to you."
The subpoenas and settlement offers are only part of the recording industry's campaign against illegal downloading. For years, the RIAA has been one of several industries who send the University Information Technology (UIT) Department notices about students who share illegally.
"The University receives hundreds of copyright infringement notices every year about students," UIT Manager of Networks and Special Projects Marj Minnigh said in an e-mail to the Daily. Students have been caught using a score of programs to share, she said. These programs include: Kazaa, LimeWire, Gnutella, eDonkey and BitTorrent.
When UIT receives the notices, which do not request money from offenders, somebody calls in the students whose IP addresses have been identified. These students are then restricted from network access and must attend a class with Judi Rennie from Tufts OnLine about copyright laws.
If students who have attended a session are caught again using illegal file-sharing programs, "they lose their account privileges for about a year," Reitman said.
"They lose their access to ResNet, but they still can use the computers in the computer lab," he said.
As the RIAA has increasingly made it its policy to punish illegal sharing, Tufts has encouraged students to use Ruckus, which provides them with the opportunity to legally download music for free.
But they do not own the music downloaded from Ruckus, so they cannot transfer it to an MP3 player. The student whose name was withheld said that for that for that reason, Ruckus is not a particularly attractive option for him.
"It would be a potential option. But in a scenario where you can't use Ruckus to put songs onto your iPod, I still prefer just to download illegally and do whatever I want with the music," he said.
