STEPHANIE TANIZAR
Assistant Perspectives Editor
LimeWire. BitTorrent. Napster. Half a century ago, these names would have been nothing but gobbledygook. Today, they are virtually recognized worldwide as popular “peer-to-peer” (P2P) or file sharing software, most commonly used to share music. Downloading songs from a P2P network, however, is illegal.
The music industry has begun to clamp down on illegal downloading in the past few years. The Recording Industry Association of America, Inc (RIAA) has led the way with its zero-tolerance policy against illegal downloading. More than 20,000 lawsuits have been brought before the court against individuals such as college students, housewives, and a 12-year-old girl in New York who didn’t know that the service her mother paid for was illegal.
As the e-mail the student body received last week reports, the RIAA brought allegations of illegal downloading to Pepperdine last fall. “Early settlement” letters were issued to three students and could have cost each about $3,000 to $4,000. If taken to court, the cost could have soared to a monumental $222,000. Jammie Thomas, mother of two from Minnesota, was forced to cough up that exact amount for downloading 24 songs.
While it’s fairly common knowledge that downloading files via a P2P network is illegal, the reality is that illegal downloading is still quite common. A survey from Greenfield Online shows that 75 percent of college students download music illegally.
Pepperdine is not a university apart. Last semester, my English 101 class presented topics on cyberculture as contributions to our final grade. Two of the presentations focused specifically on illegal filesharing: one in favor and one against. The debate that sparked off of the presentations indicated that more than three people in the 18-strong class were intimately familiar with the process of illegal downloading, though some had stopped.
That was just one class. The odds of every single illegal pirate at Seaver being crammed into that one class is about flat-out impossible.
Given the RIAA’s zero-tolerance policy, why are they not going after college students with more gusto?
Pepperdine probably has far more than three illegal downloaders on campus, but the RIAA hasn’t sent out “early settlement” letters to everyone. Why? Evidently, they don’t have the cold, hard evidence that they legally require to send those letters out.
The RIAA’s more absurd lawsuits, such as the case brought against 12 year-old Brianna LaHara, have brought about a more widespread awareness about illegal filesharing, but have also made them look pretty bad in the public eye. There’s no doubt about the fact that illegal downloading is wrong, but the RIAA’s methods have proved ineffective.
Educating the public about illegal downloads is the key, not only of the legal consequences, but also of the artists affected by illegal downloading.
The argument that a few downloads can hardly put a dent in many artists’ pocket can be made, but this only applies to extremely wealthy artists, who deserve to have their copyright protected anyway. For the artists who are just starting out, illegal downloads could prove to paint a far bleaker future.
That’s where education begins, because illegal downloads wreak havoc not just on the RIAA, but also on the artists whose livelihoods depend on those sales.
01-31-2008