Posted on 04/03/2003 8:07:11 PM PST by HAL9000
LOS ANGELES (AP) - The recording industry is suing four students at three universities for operating Napster-like file sharing systems that allegedly offered more than 1 million copies of songs for illegal downloading on the schools' high-speed Internet networks.The Recording Industry Association of America, the music industry's trade group, filed the lawsuits Thursday seeking to shut down the networks, which the group says are responsible for distributing illegal copies of songs by Avril Lavigne, Whitney Houston, Eminem and others. The suits also seek maximum damages of $150,000 per song.
The RIAA said the networks were being run by students at Princeton University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Michigan Technological University. The lawsuits were filed in federal courts in New Jersey, Michigan and New York.
The suits allege the students stored thousands of songs on a central server and made them available to students, staff, administrators and others with access to the schools' private networks. The songs could be downloaded using standard Web browsers.
The students allegedly used software with names such as Flatlan and Phynd, which allow the indexing of songs on a central server and respond to requests for individual files.
The RIAA said the offenses were akin to those committed by Napster, which was ordered shut down after the courts found it violated musical copyrights.
"These systems are just as illegal and operate in the same manner," RIAA president Cary Sherman said in a statement.
The universities, which were not named as defendants, said they were investigating the claims. All the schools have policies prohibiting the use of their computer networks for copyright infringement.
The RIAA's action irritated the president of the Michigan Technological University, who said he wished the music industry had contacted the school, as he said it had done in the past when copyright infringements were discovered.
"Had you followed the previous methods established in notification of a violation, we would have shut off the student and not allowed the problem to grow to the size and scope that it is today," Curtis Tompkins wrote Thursday in a letter to Sherman. "I am very disappointed that the RIAA decided to take this action in this manner."
The RIAA said the massive nature of the alleged offenses required a strong response.
"This is not an instance of an individual student simply offering up some sound recordings on a Web site," said Matthew Oppenheim, senior vice president of business and legal affairs for the RIAA.
In the Michigan case, Oppenheim said, the student ran a network offering more than 650,000 music files for downloading, in addition to 1,866 songs from his own personal collection.
"It would be our hope that universities are aware of what is happening on their networks," he said. "The onus shouldn't rest on any given copyright holder to provide a warning to an individual when something of this size and scope is happening."
Princeton spokeswoman Lauren Robinson-Brown said the school is unable to constantly monitor its network, but does take swift action when notified of copyright infringement. The school has removed the site, she said.
The entertainment industry has recently become more aggressive in pursuing copyright infringers.
Four entertainment industry groups sent a letter to 2,300 university presidents last year, urging a tough stand on copyright infringement, and in January a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that Verizon Communications Inc. must identify an Internet subscriber suspected of illegally offering more than 600 songs from well known artists. The RIAA had sought the user's identity with a subpoena approved under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
In February, the RIAA joined with the Motion Picture Association of America in sending a six-page brochure to Fortune 1000 corporations that suggested corporate policies and offered a sample memo to employees warning against using company computers to download content from the Web.
The brochure also carries a clear threat: Stop workers from stealing copyrighted materials or be sued.
But it sure rubs a person who once lived in a somewhat sane nation the wrong way!
Isn't a coincidence that the legal industry is thriving and virtually all our elected leaders are lawyers? Will wonders never cease!?!?
Note, interestingly, that these are internal file-sharing networks, only accessible within each university's campus.
What next? The speeders. Please.
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