Fines Violate Students' Rights

Last Wednesday, the Recording Industry Association of America threatened 20 Columbia students with lawsuits as part of its latest drive to extort money from some of the least financially independent members of society. The RIAA, a price-fixing industry cabal, accuses these students of a virtually unprovable crime as part of its increasingly archaic and legally questionable racket of "digital copyright enforcement." The threats were made possible through the cooperation of Columbia University, which "takes its obligations under copyright law very seriously," according to spokesman Robert Hornsby ("RIAA Threatens to Sue 20 For File Sharing," March 23). The seriousness and scope of these obligations, in turn, are determined entirely by the RIAA, not by a court. Columbia apparently takes its obligations under privacy law far less seriously. It is perverse and possibly illegal that a university entrusted with the personal information of its students would without reservation sell them out to a predatory, illegal monopoly like the RIAA.

The RIAA targets students for two simple reasons. For one thing, as members of a small, concentrated community under one Internet service provider (their university), they are incredibly easy to target. More important, those with legal experience and financial independence are more likely to return fire, as the NFL discovered when it inadvertently targeted law professor Wendy Seltzer of Brooklyn Law School on YouTube, no doubt assuming that most YouTube users were-like the student targets of the RIAA-young, legally inexperienced, and financially incapable of paying the legal fees necessary to fight in court. Seltzer has sued the NFL for overreaching its Digital Millennium Copyright Act rights.

Of course, the RIAA has become much more experienced at pulling and cutting the strings of our justice system than the NFL will ever be. Thankfully, the great non-profit actors of society, universities, have come to the rescue of the common man. Two of them, that is-the Universities of Wisconsin and Nebraska-have done so. Every other school in the latest sweep-Columbia included-decided to buck its legal obligation to protect students' privacy and elected instead to buckle before the RIAA as though the latter were a court itself. Unfortunately, that is no longer far from reality.

Without subpoenas, the RIAA demanded that schools pass "settlement letters" on to individuals identified only by IP address. The letters cite the DMCA and demand that targets pay a "discounted" protection payment or face a lawsuit. In short, the RIAA has asked universities to help it blackmail students and their parents (who the RIAA neglects to mention are not generally culpable for the actions of their children) by forwarding letters with questionable legal claims in them and demanding large cash payments. The decision by universities to do so may be a violation of the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act, which bars schools from making student records public without a "lawfully issued subpoena." In the words of University of Wisconsin spokesman Brian Rust in the March 19 issue of The Badger Herald, "These settlement letters are an attempt to short circuit the legal process to rely on universities to be their legal agent."

No one should be surprised by the conduct of the RIAA, which exists to allow record companies to circumvent antitrust laws, fix prices, and strangle competition. The group has typically demanded $750 per song in damages, about 1,070 times the actual wholesale price of a song, which is 70 cents. None of the plunder actually goes to the artists allegedly hurt by file sharing (I say allegedly because Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard and Koleman Strumpf of UNC-Chapel Hill found that "downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero," in a paper published in the February 2007 Journal of Political Economy). Furthermore, it has become increasingly apparent that targeting IP addresses through file-sharing programs is haphazard at best-the RIAA recently sued a person with no computer, has admitted that ISPs have misidentified "John Does," and has no tangible way to prove the connections it alleges.

The RIAA has decided that it has the right-normally reserved to government agencies-to fine students and the right-reserved to no entity-to do so without due process. Shockingly, Columbia has agreed. Students should be furious about this violation of their legal and privacy rights. They should tell the University in no uncertain terms that they are furious and their parents, who are paying the university 60 songs per year at the RIAA's prices, should also make their displeasure known. In fact, those students facing large fines due to the University's actions should consider sending a letter of their own, one stating that Columbia should consider ceasing its compliance with the RIAA's attempts to circumvent due process or-perhaps-face legal action itself in the future.

The author, a staff writer, is a Columbia College sophomore.