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Beware!: Recording Industry Goes After Students Over Music Sharing |
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April 23, 2003
Jason, a senior at the University of Maryland, ran one of the most popular Web sites on campus out of his shoebox dorm room here. The site let his 8,500 fellow dorm residents search for music files, among other things, stored on one another's computers and copy them in seconds.
Then came the news that the record industry had filed lawsuits against four students running similar sites at other universities, accusing them of enabling large-scale copyright infringement and asking for billions of dollars in damages. Within an hour, Jason, who insisted on anonymity for fear of being sued himself, had dismantled his site.
"I don't think I was doing anything wrong," said Jason, a computer science major. "But who wants to face a $98 billion debt for the rest of their lives? I was scared."
The lawsuits, filed on April 3, are the most aggressive legal action the record industry has ever directed against college students, who in recent years have exercised an enduring predisposition to consume large quantities of music by copying it over the Internet without ever paying for it. College campuses, the record industry says, have become far and away the prime locus for online piracy.
Wary of alienating young customers who continue to generate a large chunk of their revenue, record companies until recently focused on prodding university administrators to discipline their students. But freshman orientation sessions on respect for intellectual property have had little effect. With CD sales in a tailspin that record executives attribute at least partly to the downloading frenzy in academia's hallowed halls, they said they needed to try another approach.
Record executives say the lawsuits — singling out four students at three colleges — mark a turning point in the battle they have been waging since Napster popularized Internet music trading three years ago. (A federal judge in 2001 ruled that Napster had abetted copyright infringement, and it has been off line since.) The unauthorized copying of digital music that has become as routine a part of college life as cramming and keg parties may have finally lost some of its charm.
Source: NYTimes
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