Few at IU nervous about lawsuits

Somewhere, five unlucky IU students are going about their day-to-day routines, ignorant of the fact that they're among the newest targets in the Recording Industry Association of America's war on illegal file-sharing. \nThe RIAA, which represents more than 350 record labels and other companies involved in producing music, announced last Wednesday it was filing 532 lawsuits against illegal file-sharers, including 89 university network users nationwide. \nBecause the RIAA identified the users in the lawsuits based on their IP addresses, none of the five IU students know they are the ones who will be charged. \nIU's Secretary for University Counsel, Anthony Warner, said Monday his office had not yet received the identities of the IU students against whom the RIAA is levying charges.\n"The notifications will either come to the legal office, the trustees' office or to Mark Bruhn's office," he said.\nOnly IU can match the IP addresses with a user's name. \nDespite the latest wave of lawsuits, few students seem nervous about being the RIAA's unwitting prey.\n"I file-share, but I'm not worried about being caught for two reasons," said sophomore David Gong. "First, if you play the odds, the chances of getting caught are small because there are so many students who share. And second, (the RIAA) never takes everything they can get."\nRIAA president Cary Sherman said in an interview Wednesday that although the law entitles the court to award $750 to $150,000 per copyrighted work shared, the RIAA has always settled out of court in the past. The average settlement has been $3,000.\nSenior Lee Brunjes, is also unworried by the lawsuits despite sharing copyrighted files.\n"There are a lot of things you can do to download files and not get into trouble," he said. "Once you download a file, move it out of your shared folder. There are also a lot of ways to hide your ID on the Internet."\nBut the primary reason Brunjes isn't worried is because he lives off campus. All five of the students soon to be accused of illegal file-sharing were connected to the University network at the time of the sharing. \nSince many off-campus students don't connect through the IU network on their home computers, the chances of a student living off campus being included as one of the five are slim.\nSome students blame the record industry's file-sharing woes on its own greed. Freshman Nicholas Hoff-Hvale said a major reason so many people pirate music is CDs are too expensive.\n"(The record industry) needs to find a way to reduce CD prices and make them more affordable," he said.\nBut Mark Bruhn, chief Information Technology security and policy officer for University Information Technology Services, said in an e-mail to the IDS the record industry has every right to pursue students who illegally share files.\n"Certainly, copyright owners have the right under the law to seek relief from infringement," he said. "It isn't as if this should be a surprise to the individuals being targeted. It has been widely covered in the media, we have publicized it as much as we can, and we have tried to educate our network users on issues related to copyright."\nBut these sentiments are not echoed by sophomore Daniel Desloover.\n"People should be able to experience art and culture and diversity without having a big checkbook," he said. "There is a slightly elevated probability that I will be one of the students named, but I'm willing to stick it to the man."\n-- Contact staff writer Michael Zennie at mzennie@indiana.edu.