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That free song may lead to a stiff fine

Well, maybe. Either way, the recording industry is targeting college students.

By JAY CRIDLIN
Published March 19, 2007

TAMPA - As she mounted her bicycle outside the University of South Florida library, Emily Adkins spun the dial on her iPod to pick a tune for the ride.

The 21-year-old senior gets most of her music online, either by trading with friends or through the file-sharing program BitTorrent, where she can download entire albums in a snap. If she buys CDs, she buys them used. Her most recent purchase: The Decemberists' Castaways and Cutouts, an album released in 2002.

Adkins isn't apologetic about downloading free music, and she doesn't seem worried about getting caught. "You read about it happening in the newspaper," she said. "I guess it's possible, but it just seems so weird."

Weird or not, it's not only possible, it's becoming more likely every month.

On Feb. 28, the Recording Industry Association of America - the trade group of the record business - accused 400 students at 13 universities, including 31 at the University of South Florida, of illegally sharing and downloading tens of thousands of songs.

According to the RIAA, those 31 USF students had shared 17,568 songs, most during January. One was caught sharing 1,957 songs.

The RIAA's letters note that each illegally shared song carries a minimum fine of $750. Should their cases go to court, those 31 students - whose names the school is withholding due to privacy laws - would face a combined fine of $13.1-million.

Another 400 letters will go out to more universities later this month, with 400 more to follow each month after that. The mass mailings represent a "significant escalation" in the ongoing war between the RIAA and college students, said RIAA spokeswoman Jenni Engebretsen, "because the problem is so acute in the university community."

But will this crackdown be enough to actually scare students from using file-sharing programs like Ares, LimeWire, KaZaa and BitTorrent to download music for free?

"Pretty much everybody I know has downloaded music," said sophomore music major Jesus Izquierdo, 19. "It's like drinking on campus. It's still going to happen."

Indeed, USF has received the 11th-most file-sharing complaints from the RIAA during the 2006-07 year, with 490 through mid February.

To those students who do find themselves in the RIAA's crosshairs, the threat of litigation is intimidating. They're told they have 20 days to pay a fine, or else they'll be sued in federal court for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But if any of them are actually found guilty, they would be the first. Of the 18,000 individual copyright infringement lawsuits the RIAA has filed since September 2003 - including 1,000 against college students - exactly zero have come to trial. About 5,700 were settled out of court.

That means the scariest part of the letters - the bit about the $750-per-song fine - has never actually come into play. Instead, the accused students are asked to settle for a greatly reduced sum - reportedly around $4,000 - which goes not to artists or record labels, but back into the RIAA's anti-piracy coffers.

The RIAA's critics think the settlement letters are a form of bullying.

"That's exactly the intent of it: 'Pay early, pay quickly and make this campaign easy for us, rather than fighting back,' " said Corynne McSherry, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a critic of the RIAA's war on peer-to-peer networks.

Another problem, McSherry says, is that students aren't given enough time to weigh their legal rights. "It takes a while to realize the situation, figure out what's going on, what your options are and contact legal counsel," she said. "Even if you want to fight back, only having 20 days to make that decision is very difficult."

In many instances, those cases that do go to court end up going nowhere.

Adam and Marie Litvinchyk of Lutz received a warning letter from the RIAA four years ago, accusing their three teenage children of swapping music files on KaZaa. They were offered the chance to settle their case for $5,000. The Litvinchyks placed one phone call to the RIAA, then moved on with their lives.

"I got a letter a couple of years later, and I ignored that one, too," said Marie, 40, two of whose children now attend Remington College. "I'm not paying $5,000 because my kids downloaded a song. Whoever owns KaZaa should be paying for that. That's their fault."

On Feb. 27, record companies filed a copyright infringement complaint against the Litvinchyks in the Middle District of Florida. Informed of this latest complaint, Marie said it was news to her: She hadn't heard anything in months.

The RIAA says its campaign against students is as much about publicity as it is about catching actual downloaders. "Anyone engaged in music theft is a potential recipient of one of these letters," Engebretsen said.

Thirty-one students represents only about 0.07 percent of USF's undergraduate population. But the publicity these letters generate may help instill in students the fear that they could be next - even if it's 99.93 percent likely that they won't.

Sophomore Sean Alexander isn't a regular downloader, but he has used LimeWire. He's also a musician who makes his own songs available for download on his MySpace page.

"These artists are already rich enough. Why are they getting upset that people want to hear their music?" he said. "If somebody was getting fined thousands of dollars for just wanting to hear my music, I would be crushed."

Still, he believes most college students know downloading free music is against the law. And during this interview, he asked which details of his own downloading habits might make it into print.

"I'm just curious," he said. "I don't want the RIAA to see it."

USF itself doesn't face any legal action from the RIAA, but it complies with the RIAA's request to forward the letters to students so that they may settle the cases as swiftly and quietly as possible, said USF general counsel Colin Mailloux.

Unfortunately, that meant Mailloux and the USF academic computing staff had to launch their own mini-investigation into illegal downloads, poring through weeks' worth of data to verify the RIAA's claims. It took two days before the school could alert all 31 students; Mailloux then had to field calls from about a dozen panicked students asking what to do next. "It definitely is a drain of resources," he said.

In a March 8 hearing on the issue, Congress slammed universities across the nation for not doing enough to stop illegal downloads.

"Current law isn't giving universities enough incentives to stop piracy," said Rep. Howard L. Berman, (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property.

Added Rep. Ric Keller (R-Orlando): "I would say the hammer's coming. I want to see universities get serious about it."

USF is now debating whether to take a more proactive role in preventing illegal downloads. Administrators from across the university have met to brainstorm ways to make students more aware of the risks of illegal file-sharing - dorm announcements, mass mailings, maybe a section on copyright violations in the school's "University Experience" course for first-year students. The school could start monitoring all peer-to-peer traffic and high-bandwidth usage.

Other schools have gone even further. The University of Florida uses a program called Icarus that kicks students who use peer-to-peer software offline. Others have suggested instituting a nationwide fee, similar to a student activities fee, for college students to download music.

"Everything is on the table right now," said Alex Campoe, USF's information security manager.

However, cautioned Mailloux: "We can't protect the students against everything. At some point, they have to be responsible, too."

Angie Drobnic Holan Times research contributed to this story.

[Last modified March 18, 2007, 22:47:35]