The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has sent another batch of pre-litigation letters to Tufts, offering students who have illegally shared music the choice to either settle out of court or face lawsuits.
But as the campaign now enters its ninth wave of letters, it is receiving increasingly polarized reactions, with the recording industry trumpeting its successes and others calling it misguided and ineffective.
"We've seen a skyrocketing awareness among college students and the general public," RIAA Communications Director Cara Duckworth said, attributing this increased knowledge about the illegality of peer-to-peer sharing to her organization's aggressive actions.
As a result, she said that legal downloading and sharing programs have gained "real traction."
Rebecca Jeschke, the media coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a group dedicated to increasing outlets for digital communication, and Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman disagreed.
"File sharing is still continuing unabated," Jeschke said. "[The campaign] doesn't have a deterrent effect."
"I don't think that the method is effective. It doesn't change behavior," Reitman said.
The RIAA has filed around 20,000 lawsuits over the past few years, and has sent approximately 3,700 pre-litigation settlement offers to colleges and universities since this campaign was unveiled in February.
"We're focusing here because the problem of piracy is disproportionately acute on college campuses,"Duckworth said.
In the latest wave, Tufts received 15 letters. The university had previously gotten a total of 19 - 15 in the spring and four last month.
Most letters ask for between $3,000 and $5,000, and students who do not settle could face significantly higher fines.
While the RIAA only sends settlement offers to college students, nobody is exempt from lawsuits. One Minnesota woman is currently fighting a $222,000 judgment against her for illegally sharing 24 songs.
When the RIAA sends letters, it is only able to identify the IP addresses of offenders, not their actual names. University officials do not need to provide the recording industry with that information at the time of the letters, but they will eventually be forced to do so when the RIAA files a lawsuit.
Jeschke said that officials in this situation face difficult choices.
"It does put universities in a really hard place because they can become part of the enforcement arm of the RIAA," she said.
At Tufts, Reitman lets all students know when they are affected by letters so that they have the opportunity to settle out of court should they choose to.
But he is still concerned about the reasoning behind these settlement offers.
For instance, he said that some Tufts students who have received them have indicated to him that they lawfully own the music that is being illegally shared on their computers.
"That seems to be what people are getting caught on," he said.
This can happen because it is not illegal downloading that the RIAA is cracking down on, but rather illegal peer-to-peer sharing.
He also said that affected students at Tufts do not appear to have even shared a particularly large amount of music.
"It doesn't seem to be students who have a great deal of activity," he said. "When students come in, they're floored that I have this paperwork from the RIAA to forward to them."
It is still unclear what the economic effects of the recording industry's campaign have been.
Duckworth said that the RIAA has lost money on it, although she would not provide any specific numbers relating to how much it has cost.
"It's a large effort and it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of energy and it takes a lot of work," she said. "And all this work amounts to cost that we of course engage in because we felt that this is a necessary program for us."
Still, she said that the industry would be losing even more money if it were not for its letters and lawsuits.
According to RIAA, legal sales were up 73 percent in 2006 from the previous year, and the organization attributes that to its tactics.
But Jeschke said that even if that's the case, the increase may just mean that more people are downloading, both legally and illegally.
Dawn Irish, the associate director of outreach for University Information Technology, said it is sometimes hard to determine which side is right, as tracking the numbers and motivations of people who illegally share can be tricky.
"I think it is probably very hard to quantify what people are actually doing," she said.
Since Jeschke feels that the campaign is not working, she suggested that the recording industry should pursue other avenues.
"If this did have a deterrent effect or if the artists were getting paid, then there might be a better argument for it, but right now it's just futile," she said.
One alternative would be to have schools pay fees to license their students to download an unlimited amount of music. She said that this would be more profitable than "fighting against the inevitable."
In the meantime, though, the RIAA plans on pursuing its efforts, even if its officials are aware that their tactics are, for the most part, unpopular.
"I think it's fair to say that we understand that this campaign causes friction," Duckworth said. "Friction causes heat and heat causes fire."
