The RIAA’s Copywrongs

The Recording Industry and Motion Picture Associations of America are widely reviled by college students. Their chief sin is to hold the amusingly old-fashioned view that distribution of copyrighted content without consent is illegal, and to routinely sue students for sharing copyrighted content on peer-to-peer file sharing networks. While the suits are usually settled for moderate sums, they’re certainly a headache, and have the potential to saddle students with astronomical legal costs.

Only a small fraction of college students are actually sued, even though well over half of American college students download copyrighted content illegally. This is in part the result of university policies. Many schools, including Cornell, have policies that the content industry views as protecting students from liability. Administrations, though, institute these policies, not out of any love of piracy, but for sound reasons. The content industry’s desires are fundamentally outrageous and would impose impossible burdens on schools.

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There are many different networks for peer-to-peer file sharing and copyright violation on any of them is equally illegal. However, your chances of being hauled into court or the JA’s office depend on exactly where and how you “steal” your music. Using iTunes to share music, or DC++ on a campus hub, means that you’re sharing music with other Cornellians, and all file transfers and queries are confined to the Cornell network. In contrast, BitTorrent, Gnutella, Limewire and the like all share music over the public Internet, and anybody in the world — including the RIAA or its contractors — can participate.

The popular file sharing networks in use today make no effort to conceal the network addresses of their users. The RIAA and the MPAA are aware of this fact, and hire contractors to join peer-to-peer file distribution networks and monitor the traffic. Suppose you’re uploading or downloading music across the Internet. After hours or days of observation, the contractor can report back that “the machine at such-and-such a network address was sharing the following copyrighted songs.” At that point, the lawyers are called in, and Cornell can be compelled to identify you based on your IP address. After you are identified, the RIAA can file suit against you and the nightmarish legal process begins. This does not happen often at Cornell, but it happens elsewhere, and could happen here.

Copyright violation is a violation of Cornell policy. But Cornell, also as a matter of policy, does not routinely monitor network connections. Cornell is not watching what you do on the network, unless a problem has been brought to their notice in some other way. Furthermore, Cornell does not allow the RIAA or other content owners access to the Cornell network to do their own monitoring. In effect, Cornell shields file-sharing on the campus network from prying eyes, and then the University averts its own gaze from any illicit activities that are not somehow brought to the attention of university officials. As a result, you are far less likely to be hauled into court if you use DC++ or iTunes, than if you use BitTorrent or Gnutella.

This hands-off policy irks the content industry to no end. The MPAA has pushed, hard, for colleges to install filtering software, and has even lobbied for legislation requiring this. Cornell, and most other universities, are equally insistent in refusing. Aside from an unwillingness to do the RIAA’s dirty work, and a possible lack of eagerness to incriminate their own students, universities raise powerful objections to the content industry’s suggested requirements.

The first objection universities level against such demands is that sniffing the wires into and out of student computers, or monitoring information access in general, is destructive to academic freedom. Any such monitoring will be either ineffective or intrusive. Universities have no easy way to distinguish legal distribution of content from illegal distribution; whether sharing a file is licit depends entirely on the terms set by the copyright holder. Further, the same file can be encoded in many different ways. As a result, any filtering software will either have a large number of false positives or will not catch file sharers who are even slightly careful. Intrusive monitoring, by discouraging students from consuming online information, would chill free inquiry and disrupt learning.

In addition, filtering would impose an expensive and difficult duty on universities, which commercial internet service providers, businesses and other organizations are not subject to. By law, ISPs are generally not liable for the actions of their subscribers. ResNet users, in effect, have Cornell for an ISP, and so Cornell, reasonably, views with suspicion proposals that the university take up duties that no commercial ISP would contemplate.

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, ISPs are not liable for the misdeeds of their subscribers, provided that the ISP complies with certain requirements that ResNet follows. As a result, the RIAA probably has no legal claim against Cornell or any other university. They are thus asking the universities to make very onerous concessions for very little in return.

The content industry can bring to bear only one sort of pressure. This is the threat that, if universities do not police their students voluntarily, legislatures will compel them to do so. However, the telecommunications and computer manufacturing industries are dead-set against such legislation, and they dwarf the record and movie industries in revenue and political influence. The RIAA and MPAA do not have the political clout to get such legislation passed. They are bluffing, and universities are absolutely right to call their bluff. Cornell has taken a bold stand, and for that, deserves to be commended.

Ari Rabkin is a graduate student in Computer Science. He can be contacted at asr32­@­c­o­r­n­ell.edu. Between the Lines appears Thursdays.