In the midst of an ongoing anti-piracy campaign led by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Tufts is correct in protecting its students from unreasonable litigation. In its most recent round of legal action, the RIAA has subpoenaed the names of 11 Tufts students who allegedly engaged in illegal file sharing. The trade association wants Tufts to identify the offending students through university network records.
According to Tufts administrators, however, the records are not accurate enough to match students' identities to Internet activity in two cases. We at the Daily could not agree more.
In order to prove a student's guilt, the records must show that a specific user illegally shared files. The university has two ways to investigate this.
Records from the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) can accurately match an Internet Protocol (IP) address to an individual computer. DHCP records, however, are only kept for 10 days, and therefore the university must identify students using another, less accurate, set of records obtained by the Activity Resolution Protocol (ARP). While ARP records are stored indefinitely, they cannot definitively make that connection. Consequently, the RIAA would have to submit an entire group of students to legal scrutiny in order to identify a single violator. Just as police officers should not lock down a neighborhood for a single theft, the RIAA should not get access to the private information of several students if they are really only concerned about one of them.
It is often tempting to sacrifice liberties for expediency and results. But we live in a society that holds sacred the value of procedural rights. It's for that very reason that the RIAA should not be allowed to cast this wide net and blanket together all potential offenders.
There's also the issue of unbalanced resources. Being named in an RIAA lawsuit is a difficult situation for any student since proving one's innocence against a better-financed and more powerful opponent is an intimidating experience. As a result, it's refreshing to see Tufts administrators argue for students unfairly dragged into legal maneuvering. And it's equally encouraging to hear that the RIAA has seemingly decided to concede the validity of the university's concerns.
After all, the RIAA should not be painted as the sole ‘bad guy' in the file-sharing debate. Students are undoubtedly breaking the law when they engage in piracy, so it's hardly a mystery why the association is upset. But a separate question is whether or not the RIAA's tactics are intelligent, or even realistic.
At the Daily, we have frequently argued on this page that suing its customers as a means to prevent piracy will not solve the RIAA's problems; the battle cannot be won through fear. We instead encourage the RIAA to work with students to encourage legal file-sharing options.
Services like Ruckus and Pandora, rather than lawsuits and subpoenas, must be the central pieces in the RIAA's anti-piracy campaign.
