The Recording Industry Association of America brought 405 copyright infringement lawsuits against the students of 18 colleges and universities yesterday in a strike aimed at users of the popular file-sharing program i2hub, which runs on the university computer network known as Internet2. None of the lawsuits targeted Dartmouth students.
"Quite simply, this special, high-speed Internet technology designed for important academic research has been hijacked for illegal purposes," Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA said in an online press conference held yesterday.
"That's why we decided to act quickly -- to let everyone know that illegal file-trading on Internet2 is not safe from detection."
Internet2 was considered by many students to be a secure way to illegally download music because the network is only used by approximately 200 colleges and universities to speed up connection rates when sharing information between these colleges.
Internet2 sites employ several cutting-edge networking applications, generally resulting in much higher bandwidth for transfers between Internet2 locations than for normal traffic on the World Wide Web. In some tests, Internet2 file-swappers reportedly averaged tranfer times of less than five minutes for a movie and less than 20 seconds for a song.
"The perception has always been that Internet2 is a private network but once you see all these subpoenas going down, we start finding out what's really private and what's really secure," said Robert Johnson, the College's director of Telecommunications in Computing Services. "The RIAA isn't backing down. If we do get subpoenaed to produce this information, we do have to comply."
Though no Dartmouth students were sued yesterday, the RIAA also sent letters to the presidents of 140 colleges and universities informing them of i2hub activity on their campuses. The RIAA did not release a list of the 140 schools because Sherman described each letter as "a private communication."
Robert Donin, general counsel for the College, said that to his knowledge Dartmouth has not received one of these letters.
"This is another reminder that the entertainment industry is going to aggressively enforce its rights under the copyright law and I would urge Dartmouth students not to engage in file-sharing of commercially copyrighted music or movies," Donin said, encouraging students to instead use legal online services such as iTunes and Rhapsody.
Copyright infringement holds a penalty of $750 to $1,500 per infringed work. While most defendants make plea bargains, the fact that each student who received a lawsuit yesterday had an average of 2300 illegal mp3s on his or her computer means that the potential costs are extremely high. One student's computer contained as many as 13,600 illegal mp3s.
Sherman closed the press conference by expressing a commonality he shared with the student community, "a love of music."
"People think of artists as uniformly rich, but that's just not the case," Sherman said. "For every Britney, there are thousands of unknown artists working their way up, CD plant workers, marketing people, delivery people, accountants, graphic designers, studio engineers, background musicians, vocalists -- it goes on and on."
The Motion Picture Association of America said it intends to file similar lawsuits in the near future.
