RIAA College Crackdown Part 13, Targets 401 More Students

The madness continues as it renews its ill-conceived anti-piracy campaign targeting poor college students across the country.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), on behalf of its member record companies, announced that it had sent a new wave of 401 pre-litigation settlement letters to 12 universities late last week.

It continues its campaign of unfairly singling out the least able to afford the so-called “settlement” letters in the first place. College students are a ripe target because they have little income or time with which to defend themselves in court, plus they on average have parents willing and able to come up with a few grand in “settlement” money to keep their kid out of trouble.

According to an RIAA press release, of the 5005 total letters sent in prior campus crackdowns the RIAA has reached settlements with more than 2,300 of the recipients. Of the remainder, formal lawsuits have been filed against 2,465 individuals so far for which the RIAA blames on a combination of students refusing to settle along with not being given the opportunity to do do because their university failed to forward the letters.

It’s for all intent and purposes a form of legal extortion that seeks a quick and courtroom-free resolution. Nevermind that it does little to address piracy as a whole or the root causes for the decline in annual revenue for the music industry. You’d think that with all the billions spent on lawyers and lawsuits that somebody somewhere on their payroll would point out that people just don’t buy CDs anymore.

Nobody wants to tote around a clunky portable CD player or have to invest in bulky CD jukeboxes when a simple digital media player and PC will do, nor are they willing to lug around stacks of CDs merely to play a handful of their favorite tracks at a friend’s house.

Music is going digital and the music industry is running scared, for it knows that now anyone can distribute music.

Here’s the latest list of RIAA targets:

• Boston University (35)
• Columbia University (50)
• Drexel University (33)
• Indiana University (40)
• North Carolina State University (35)
• Ohio State University (30)
• Purdue University (28)
• Tufts University (20)
• University of Maine System (32)
• University of New Hampshire (32)
• University of Southern California (50)
• University of Virginia (16)

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5. RIAA College Crackdown Round 3