Breaks previous record, targeting largest number of suspected file-sharers ever since launching its campus music theft initiatives back in 2007.
Leave it up to the RIAA to break its own record for most ever number of poor college students targeted for a lawsuit. For late last week it sent out 569 “pre-litigation settlement letters” to college students on 26 campuses across the country whom it suspects of illegal file-sharing. Since it began targeting college students back on February 28, 2007 the previous record had been 503, thus making this latest round, the thirteenth for those keeping track, the biggest ever.
As per its usual method of circumventing the legal process, targeted students have the option of paying the RIAA several thousand dollars to avoid going to court and potentially facing much higher fines and legal fees. It even still offfers its P2P Lawsuits site where the accused can quickly ante up their scholarship money or parents donations from the convenience of their college dorm.
I think the fact that it’s been more than 2 years since its campus crackdown began and file-sharing is just if not more so prevalent than ever should really tell the RIAA something – that it’s plan just isn’t working!
If the RIAA was smart it would try to listen to what EMI’s new digital music chief Douglas Merrill said recently, that “Suing fans doesn’t feel like a winning strategy.” If you have the same problem as you did two years ago, despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars, countless hours of manpower, and have managed to anger artists, music fans, and non-music fans alike in the process then I think it’s obviously not a “winning strategy.”
Merrill, it seems, is also the only one aware of the data out there “…that shows that file-sharing is actually good for artists.”
It’s too bad that the RIAA has yet to make this realization. For what’s even more despicable about targeting illegal file-sharing on college campus networks is that it’s most likely unfairly singling out students unable to afford off-campus housing.
By targeting students who reside on campus and therefore use its network for internet access then the RIAA is predominantly targeting students receiving financial assistance to fund their college education. They are also most likely to be unable to afford counsel or to defend themselves in a court of law.
As for the 26 college campuses targeted last week, here’s a full breakdown of the number of letters to be received by each of them:
University of Texas at Austin, 75
University of Tennessee at Knoxville, 74
University of Washington, 36
University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, 35
Iowa State University, 32
Central Michigan University, 31
Columbia University, 26
University of Georgia, 26
Yale University, 26
University of Nebraska at Lincoln, 22
Cornell University, 21
University of California at Davis, 20
Drexel University, 19
Florida State University, 18
University of California at Santa Barbara, 18
University of Pennsylvania, 18
University of New Mexico, 15
Duke University, 14
University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire, 12
University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, 9
University of California at Merced, 8
University of Wisconsin at Madison, 6
University of Wisconsin-Stout, 5
University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, 1
University of Wisconsin-Parkside, 1
University of Wisconsin at River Falls, 1
(BTW I’d like to say congrats to my hometown Merced for making the list this time around)
I've been interested in P2P since the early, high-flying days of Napster and KaZaA. I believe that analog copyright laws are ill-suited to the digital age, and that art and culture shouldn't be subject to the whims of international entertainment industry conglomerates. Twitter | Google Plus
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Do you not think that by downloading content you are using more content? If you ever found something that you never heard of before simply because of its availability online do you not agree that downloading has expanded your knowledge of a broader range of content? If you then paid for that content that you would never have otherwise found in the first place would you consider yourself a thief to the content you would never have otherwise found out about in the first place? To me this is why filesharers are bigger spenders on so-called "intellectual property" - the mere fact that they are able to find more content to spend on in the first place. I also count things like hats t-shirts posters and other memorabilia as spending on that particular thing too btw.
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