Colleges, students adapt in response to RIAA lawsuits

Like so many of his peers, Rusty Tracey fell in love with file sharing when Napster debuted. And, like so many others, Tracey, who is a student at Washington State Community College in Marietta, Ohio, wandered from program to program when the pioneering software crumbled amid legal difficulty.\nNow, with students and citizens alike being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for the act, Tracey isn't buckling. He's just finding new ways to build his rather extensive collection of MP3s.\n"You really want to know?" he asks when pressed for just how many he's accumulated. "About 25,000. And the majority of those are CD-quality."\nTracey isn't concerned with being sued, even though he is exactly who the recording industry is trying to stop. In March the group brought suits against 89 users at 21 university networks across the country, including five IU students.\nWith free, high-speed Internet connections and large populations of music-loving, cash-strapped students, illegal file sharing quickly became an issue on campuses throughout the country. It came as no surprise that the RIAA directed part of its campaign at university networks. \n"Piracy on campuses is particularly rampant," said RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy. "Students have more time than money. They have access to a high-speed Internet connection for free. We recognize, as does the university community, that college is a place where the problem is particularly acute. It made sense to expand the litigation program to universities and students."\nThe extent of the recording industry's efforts is not limited to lawsuits. Lamy said the group works closely with schools to develop technological solutions, orientation programs and legal downloading services. \nRIAA President Cary Sherman and Penn State President Graham Spanier co-chair the Joint Committee of Higher Education and Entertainment Industry, a congressional board formed in December 2002 to find a solution to widespread illegal file sharing on college campuses. Within a year of its formation, Penn State had found its solution in a revamped form of Napster with legal downloads and a monthly charge covered by student technology fees.\n"It's been very successful," said PSU spokesman Tyson Kendig of Napster, which became available for students in January. "It launched to about 17,000 on campus living in the residence halls, and, according to Napster, at its peak, students were accessing and downloading audio streams at more than 100,000 a day. That's a pretty significant number there. The vast majority eligible to sign up did and used it regularly."\nWhether or not efforts to limit illegal file sharing actually have that effect is a point of contention between advocates and opponents of peer-to-peer downloading. The lawsuits raised awareness, Lamy said, and a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project from earlier this year reported file sharing declined by 50 percent in the wake of the legal action. \nAccording to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, however, that study was flawed, and file sharing has actually increased over the past year. \n"The Pew study was a phone survey," said Jason Schultz, staff attorney for the EFF, an activist group that defends individual rights in cyberspace. "I don't fault them for their intention, but any time you call someone up and say 'Hey, have you broken this law?' they're unlikely to admit they have. If you called up and asked college students under 21, 'Have you drunk alcohol in the last month,' you'll probably get some skewed responses." \nCompanies like BayTSP and BigChampagne, which monitor the amount of traffic on peer-to-peer networks, actually report downloading levels at or near its highest ever. But BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland said that shouldn't necessarily be read as a defiant response to the lawsuits: Since file sharing is an emerging technology, the numbers would likely increase anyway as more users caught on for the first time. \n"More people are swapping more stuff than any period in the past. But that would be the case with or without the lawsuits."\nSchultz said the high downloading numbers mean the RIAA should give up its legal campaign, as it has minimal effect.\n"They have an effect on the people they sue -- they scare the dickens out of people they sue," Schultz said. "But in terms of the general population, there has been no effect to really deter file sharing. Tens of millions of people have fallen in love with this technology and see it as the way to do music."\nComplicating matters for those trying to prevent illegal file swapping is the influx of new programs that do the same old trick. For every service like Napster or Audiogalaxy who turn to new, legal downloads, more decentralized, harder to track file sharing services pop up for users to explore.\nThe recording industry has not sat idly by as downloading music soared in popularity. Legal music downloading programs like Napster, iTunes and Rhapsody are testaments to the recording companies' attempt to provide what consumers want. \nLamy said the online marketplace has "vast potential," and he credits the RIAA lawsuits with helping it to develop. For Schultz and the EFF, however, the new pay programs are a poor substitute for their predecessors. \n"Those services are not peer-to-peer," he said. "The new Napster is very unlike the old Napster -- it's really a crippled version of the old system. They offer only a small drop in the bucket of music offerings, when with peer-to-peer you can find any music, any song on the planet. And the songs usually aren't in MP3, they're usually in some kind of restricted format where you can't burn it onto a CD, and you can't listen to it on another computer"