p2pnet news | RIAA News:- Ohio University has been in the forefront of Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s anti-student, anti-P2P, anti- file sharing campaign from the beginning and once had the distinction of being the university on the receiving end of the most RIAA extortion demands.

Now one of its students, Brandon Martin, “could have to pay more than $7,000″ because he didn’t respond to Big 4 lawsuit, says The Post.

“A default judgment by the court would rule in favor of the record companies by default because Martin did not respond to the lawsuit against him,” says the story, stating:

That motion asks for $6,750 in damages, $445 in legal fees and an injunction preventing Martin from further distributing the plaintiffs’ copyrighted works. Because the record companies are seeking the minimum damages under copyright law - $750 per song for nine songs - the motion states no evidentiary hearing is necessary.

With the University of Oregon as an example, is OU now standing firmly behind Martin and other university students being harried and harassed by the Big 4’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America)?

It is not.

And the same applies to Cornell where in today’s the Cornell Daily Sun, IT policy head Tracy Mitrano is quoted as being, “mostly critical of students’ attempts to transfer their side of responsibilities on the university”.

However, Oregon state, in the shape of its attorney general, and Oregon University, take another view.

They’re actively representing 17 students who are under RIAA attack.

‘Tell the RIAA to take a hike’

“That a subpoena has been sent out doesn’t mean the person on the receiving end will act on it and indeed, increasing numbers of academics in the US are protesting as the labels continue to seriously disrupt classes and lessons by firing these documents at students, and by coercing school staffs into passing on the extortionate ’settlement’ letters to those whom they’re supposed to be teaching, not intimidating,” p2pnet posted in July, going on:

“Harvard and other universities to which the RIAA sent pre-litigation notices, ‘ought to take strong, direct action’ and ‘tell the RIAA to take a hike,’ believe Charles Nesson, William F. Weld professor of law, Harvard Law School, and founder and faculty co-director, Berkman Center for Internet & Society; and John Palfrey, clinical professor of law and executive director, the Berkman Center.

Said Nesson and Palfrey:

This Spring, 1,200 pre-litigation letters arrived unannounced at universities across the country. The RIAA promises more will follow. These letters tell the university which students the RIAA plans on suing, identifying the students only by their IP addresses, the ‘license plates’ of Internet connections. Because the RIAA does not know the names behind the IP addresses, the letters ask the universities to deliver the notices to the proper students, rather than relying upon the ordinary legal mechanisms.

Universities should have no part in this extraordinary process.

‘A more educational approach’

Nesson, together with Wendy Seltzer, is also cited in Suzy Gustafson’s post in the Cornell Daily Sun which kicks off:

On Nov. 1, a short policy update landed in students’ e-mail inboxes, jointly signed by Director of Information Technology Policy Tracy Mitrano, Dean of Students Kent Hubbell ‘67 and Judicial Administrator Mary Beth Grant, marking the latest piece in Cornell’s ongoing internet copyright infringement puzzle.

In addition to reminding students (of what is becoming the commonly known) illegality of file share programs like Cornell’s intranet DC++, the e-mail alerted students to the increasingly aggressive prosecuting tactics of content owners like the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America.

The ‘update’ explained Cornell will forward infringement notices it receives to the Office of the Judicial Administrator, “and first time recipients will then take the newly-designed Copyright Education Course”. [The so-called Copyright Education Course is the work of Mirano and is, says the post, “mandatory” for anyone on the wrong end of one of the RIAA infringement (read ‘extortion’) notices. “We are trying to shift away from a punitive to a more educational approach,” she’s quoted as saying.]

Say Seltzer and Nesson:

One can easily understand why the RIAA wants help from universities in facilitating its enforcement actions against students who download copyrighted music without paying for it. It is easier to litigate against change than to change with it. If the RIAA saw a better way to protect its existing business, it would not be threatening our students, forcing our librarians and administrators to be copyright police, and flooding our courts with lawsuits against relatively defenseless families without lawyers or ready means to pay.

We can even understand the attraction of using lawsuits to shore up an aging business model rather than engaging with disruptive technologies and the risks that new business models entail.

But mere understanding is no reason for a university to voluntarily assist the RIAA with its threatening and abusive tactics. Instead, we should be assisting our students both by explaining the law and by resisting the subpoenas that the RIAA serves upon us. We should be deploying our clinical legal student training programs to defend our targeted students.

We should be lobbying Congress for a roll back of the draconian copyright law that the copyright industry has forced upon us. Intellectual property can be efficient when its boundaries are relatively self-evident.

‘It’s [essentially] like a lie detector test’

“Mitrano, though highly critical on various counts of content owners’ demands, said that Cornell’s position is to comply when industry subpoenas are issued,” continues Gustafson. “They are addressed to the University Council’s Valerie Cross Dorn, who then collaborates with other University sectors like I.T. in determining how to treat them.”

But critics, such as alumnus Elliot Bäck ‘06, “challenge Cornell’s passivity with the subpoenas by pointing to universities who have chosen to fight them, says the story, continuing

The University of Oregon, recently faced with an RIAA subpoena for 17 of its students, moved to quash the RIAA’s subpoena on the grounds of facing ‘undue burden’ in the identification of its accused students. Universities must locate students according to Internet Protocol addresses, which might entail a host of complications without proper investigation.”

Bäck likens the accuracy of correctly identifying students from I.P.s to a high-probability gamble.

‘It’s [essentially] like a lie detector test,’ he said.

On IP addresses, “by itself an IP number on a packet has only suggestive value and is not reliable evidence at all,” says University of Chicago professor Mike O’Donnell.”

Stay tuned.

Jon Newton - p2pnet

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 9:48 am and is filed under RIAA News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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