Record companies charged eight more UCSD Internet users last week with illegally sharing copyrighted music, bringing the total number of campus affiliates who have faced pirating charges over the past six months to 35.
As in the first two rounds of lawsuits filed in April and late May, all eight defendants are accused of violating federal copyright laws by illicitly using “i2hub” file-sharing software through the special academic Internet2 network, which allows file transfers to occur at just a fraction of the time required for regular technology.
Though the Recording Industry Association of America said that those charged were guilty of “very egregious” and “harmful” conduct, the group did not release specific statistics on the number of songs each is accused of sharing. In its first wave of lawsuits last spring, the RIAA said it was targeting students sharing an average of 2,300 songs each.
“Those who continue to engage in this online theft pose a direct threat to the music community’s ability to invest in new bands and the new music that fans want to hear,” RIAA President Cary Sherman stated in the group’s press release. “These lawsuits are an important part of our defense against that threat.”
According to supporting documents filed with the federal district court in San Diego, the defendants in the most recent wave of suits are all said to have used i2hub through the campus network in August and early September. Though the RIAA suggested that all of the defendants were students, Academic Computing Services Director Tony Wood said it was possible that some of those charged may have been attendees at the many conferences hosted on campus during the summer.
Neither the university nor the recording companies know the names of the defendants, all identified only by their Internet Protocol addresses and listed simply as “John Doe” in the lawsuits.
A sample of songs the record companies believe the eight have shared illegally — listed in an exhibit attached to the lawsuit — includes a variety of performers and genres, ranging from the Eagles’ “Hotel California” to Snoop Dogg’s “Lay Low.”
In their announcement of the suits, record companies also praised efforts of Reps. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) and Howard Berman (D-Van Nuys), the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property. In a recent hearing, both Berman and Smith said they would ask the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ investigative arm, to study why some universities have been more successful than others in combating Internet piracy.
Gene Smith, a spokeswoman for Berman, said she had no information on the pending GAO review and Shanna Winters, the counsel for the minority party on the committee, said she could provide no more details because the formal GAO request will not be formulated until later this month.
RIAA spokeswoman Jenni Engebretsen would not say whether her group’s support for the GAO study meant that it believed some universities were dragging their feet in combating illegal downloading.
“Any initiative that helps shed light on this important issue is positive,” she said, pointing to a recent joint report released by the entertainment industry and higher education community as a model for cooperative action.
While the report widely praised universities for promoting legal alternatives to piracy, it concluded that “many schools unfortunately have yielded to complacency in their methods of addressing piracy on campus.”
Wood said UCSD would continue to buck RIAA demands that it and all other universities restrict student access to peer-to-peer software, which the industry group has argued allows for illegal sharing to take place.
“We obviously have stayed away from more aggressive censoring and we will continue to do that,” he said. “We’ve taken the position that, in and of itself, peer-to-peer software is not illegal. And we’ve tried to do some educational steps to let people know that the movement of copyrighted works is illegal.”
In addition, Wood said that lawmakers would likely face difficult challenges if they attempt to use the findings from the GAO study to craft new legal restrictions.
“I think it would be difficult for a regulator to write laws that went beyond the banning of exchange of copyrighted materials that didn’t also restrict certain types of software that are known to be in use by the research community,” he said.
The eight new filings have come as part of record companies’ most recent round of suits against 757 individuals, including students at UC Berkeley and UCLA. The RIAA has said that most of the UCSD students charged last spring have chosen to settle out of court.
