Our office first became acquainted with Recording Industry Association of America back in November 2003 when an NCSU student was targeted for illegally downloading music. At that time in RIAA’s history, they usually targeted one student per major school in an effort to hopefully serve as a deterrent to other students. They wanted to send the message that they could pierce the anonymity of the Internet and see what most hoped was kept secret in an effort to protect their copyrights.
At that time, only NCSU and UNC-Chapel Hill were targeted in North Carolina with one lawsuit each. The students were successful with their Motion to Quash the RIAA subpoena, so their names were never disclosed. All was quiet until February 2007. Since that time, NCSU has been targeted with dozens of RIAA lawsuits. There were 23 Doe lawsuits filed in May 2007, 38 were filed in August 2007, and 34 in October 2007. In addition, several were filed in December 2007 against off-campus students who were receiving free Internet service through their apartment complexes. A new batch of lawsuits is currently in the works again to start of 2008 with a bang.
None of these lawsuits have appeared to stem the tide. According to several news reports, over 20,000 lawsuits were filed last year alone in Federal court by RIAA. As a result, several news agencies throughout the past year have produced statistics and rankings of universities and colleges across the country of the worst offenders of illegal downloading. NCSU is usually in the top 20 of those lists and at one time was in the top five.
For some reason, it would seem, RIAA has chosen NCSU as one of its main benefactors of lawsuits. None of the other universities in North Carolina have received anywhere near the number of lawsuits that we have. Carolina is in the single digits. These numbers have provoked one attorney to ask what NCSU ever did to deserve this kind of attention. What could be the reason for that discrepancy? I am not convinced that it is because the students at NCSU illegally download here more than any other students in North Carolina.
We are finding that most students actually began illegally downloading while they were in high school or younger. That was well before they became students at NCSU. Therefore, it seems very unlikely that it just happens to be that NCSU students are more prone than anyone else to illegally download. Is it because we are a technical school? Is it because students here use computers for everything from classes to social interaction more so than other students at other campuses? I think not. It is kind of like when you are driving down the highway going the same speed as everyone else yet you are chosen by the highway patrol for a speeding ticket. You were speeding, but it just does not seem fair that you got caught while everyone else also speeding did not. It is still a violation of the law.
Unfortunately, the stakes are much higher and in the legal realm, there is no exception in the copyright statutes for first-time offenders or for those who indicate that they did not know the consequences would be that serious.
How can the University cut down on the number of students targeted by the RIAA. E-mail [email protected]
