Remember the good old days of Napster? These were the days when a new technology called "file sharing" was being put to good use by people like you and me all around the country: downloading great music for free. These were the days when I, a 14-year-old budding musician, was using Napster to expand my musical horizons. These were also the days when the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) was apparently still in the dark.
Wait a second. I was 14 and listening to Led Zeppelin; they were industry veterans with a financial interest in protecting their product. Yet, I was able to get free music while they stood on the sidelines. And herein lies the root of the current lawsuits by the RIAA: Instead of regulating file sharing at the end of the 1990s, the record companies have today become what a writer for the Daily Orange of Syracuse University has called "a schoolyard bully picking on American college students."
As was recently reported in The Dartmouth ("RIAA threatens music downloaders," March 29), the RIAA likes to take the lunch/beer money of college students through what amounts to litigious bullying: a pre-litigation settlement ranging between $3,000-$5,000. Their stated effort is to help "teach students right from wrong" when it comes to music piracy. Their website also reminds us that when we pirate music, we hurt the entire chain of music production from the high schooler working at record stores to the companies trying to develop new artists. However, the site makes a glaring omission: When music is illegally downloaded, the record companies don't make money on record sales. So, they take it from us. Like all bullying, theirs is imprecise and rests on dubious grounds.
Why these amounts? Who knows! My guess is that this amount represents a strong deterrent to future file sharing, but not so strong that the RIAA can't get paid. This amount received over and over again will also add up: 400 settlements equals $1,200,000.
And surely, there must be some rationale behind who gets slapped with the pre-litigation settlement and who does not, right? Wrong. Nowhere are there stipulations regarding who gets prosecuted. This is selective enforcement at its worst, not to mention questionably legal.
What makes this situation more troubling, especially as the RIAA has the gall to use the moral language of "right and wrong," is that no information is provided regarding just how the RIAA gets your IP address and knows you have downloaded files illegally. I'm no legal scholar, but it seems to me that the actions of the record companies in these cases might conflict with our Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable search and seizure.
So what is to be done? I think a solution begins with the record companies realizing that they are partly responsible for the problem instead of placing all the blame on users. If they had been more attentive to the effect of Internet technology on their industry eight years ago, they wouldn't be financially suffering today. Between 1999 and September 2003 -- when lawsuits began -- millions of today's college students became accustomed to downloading music free of charge. Where was the record industry at this time?
Additionally, this is yet another scenario of media distribution companies operating along a pre-Internet distribution rubric and blaming the web-savvy for their ingenuity. An updated distribution rubric must take into account web sales and the public's desire -- not to mention expectation -- of free music. I don't know exactly how this would look but it may include: making new hit singles free for downloading, making fewer physical CDs and thereby increasing their chances of turning a profit on these, and/or putting money towards aggressively disabling file-sharing applications so that they may no longer be downloaded.
That said, we as college students must recognize that downloading music off of Limewire, or through a person-to-person server, is not entirely legal either. Whether or not we have come to expect free music, we must at least acknowledge that some of what the companies are saying is correct -- regardless of how painful of an admission this is. In the end, it may only be when we collectively drop the somewhat arrogant expectation that music is a commodity to be freely downloaded that the companies will relax their litigious bullying.
