Had Jared Welch waited two weeks to settle his lawsuit with the Recording Industry Association of America, he would have $4,000 more in his bank account. But he didn’t, and he met the Wall Street Journal’s announcement that the RIAA was abandoning its attempts to halt music piracy by filing mass lawsuits with only disbelief.
Because if starting a new semester weren’t enough after finishing his last semester with grades that had been affected by the stress of settling the lawsuit, he is now resigned to regret time.
Instead, it will be working with Internet Service Providers to track customers’ illegal downloading activity, send warning e-mails to people who are found to be downloading illegally and, if necessary, file lawsuits against those who repeatedly ignore the warnings or who have downloaded massive amounts of music files.
“It’s ridiculous that they went through the trouble of getting college kids,” Welch, an undeclared junior, said. “I’m not the one that supplied it to the Internet to be able to be used.”
And he should know. A month ago, he gave up thousands of dollars to settle with the industry after it caught him downloading 10 songs through campus-provided Internet. He said he had considered fighting the lawsuit, but after consulting with his roommate’s mother, a lawyer, he decided it would be cheaper and less stressful to pay the fee.
Before last month, the RIAA hadn’t taken any action with the lawsuit since it sent Welch an e-mail last year stating he had to delete the songs.
“They told me to delete everything I had and I’d be fine,” he said. “I deleted it all, and they waited a year to say they were filing a lawsuit for illegally downloading music through Limewire. They sent me a lawsuit. It was 10 songs I was getting in trouble for.”
Three of these songs he didn’t download, he said. One of the 10 was “Snow” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Regardless of who did the downloading, or what the price for the songs would have been on iTunes, each song cost him $400.
“At first, I was like, well, it’s here, might as well use it,” he said. “Yeah, maybe it was wrong, but I still did it. I’m already paying a lot to go to college. I just think it’s ridiculous of them.”
After finding out the industry plans to drop its mass lawsuits just a few weeks after he paid up, Welch said he deserves some type of compensation from the company, which the Wall Street Journal reported had stopped filing mass lawsuits earlier in the fall.
“I should have held off for a couple more weeks,” he said. “They owe me a little something for all the trouble I had to go through, all the e-mails they were sending me. They should at least get some of that money back if they had dropped all of that. It’s a little ridiculous that now, after I just paid it, they drop all the lawsuits.”
Although there is now no direct threat looming over filesharing applications like Limewire, Welch said he has no plans to re-download the service.
“I’m not even going to download anything else. I’m not even going to think about having to deal with them anymore,” Welch said. “It’s stressful having a lawsuit filed against me and being sued, and I don’t even want to think about taking that chance anymore. I don’t think it’s worth the risk.”
As for the industry’s plan to work with ISPs in an attempt to stop illegal downloading more directly — the Wall Street Journal article stated ISPs reserved the right to cut off access to a file sharing application or to the Internet if a customer refused to stop illegally downloading music — Welch said it won’t stop people from a habit that has been socially perpetuated.
For Pete Green, that habit started more than 10 years ago and is one that made him feel as if he’s “always flying under the radar” — and for now, that’s where he’d like to stay. Green, a junior in design, said the RIAA’s new partnership with unnamed ISPs could become “a lot more oppressive” than its failed and costly attempts at controlling music piracy with mass lawsuits.
“They also weren’t successful at all suing people, so they may just be frustrated with that,” he said. “If they were actually able to do this, it could get way worse.”
He said although some people will see this new step as a lenient, less efficient take on file sharing prosecution, he has been downloading music for long enough to see smoke signals warning of something worse. He plans to keep using torrent, a file format of peer-to-peer sharing network that disables the ability to trace a file’s origin.
“I’m almost 30, so I’ve been doing some kind of downloading since the Internet’s been around,” he said. “Torrent popped up about 10 years ago, and I’ve been heavily downloading for a while. I’m a bad person.”
Green said he has used file sharing applications like Kazaa and Limewire that download to a user’s desktop, but “anything that got so big that it was an application, they jump all over those things and shut them down fast.”
Over the years, he’s accumulated a 22-gigabyte music collection. And that’s just what’s left — he said he “tears through” music files, eliminating 95 percent of newly downloaded files.
“I’m a huge content devourer,” he said. “A lot of stuff I listen to is hard to even find. In a lot of cases I can’t find it in a legit method but you can download it in a torrent method. As time passes my tastes have gone more and more underground, so you just can’t find them.”
Although Green said he uses torrent to sift through albums that either aren’t located in stores or that he is not sure will fit his taste without getting caught by the RIAA, he said that fear was not why he chooses to use torrent.
“Honestly, it was just kind of the natural progression of things. The older, bigger networks that had an application, those things would be taken down,” he said. “I didn’t make a conscious choice to move away from any of those other things. I would boot them up and find out that they didn’t work.”
And Green said he would rather be able to fly above the radar and download music legally, he doesn’t plan to change the way he collects music.
“I look at it kind of like speeding, where it’s like a minor transgression,” he said. “Everyone out there is driving a little over the speed limit, watching over their shoulders, watching the on ramps for the cops. They know this is not the biggest transgression in their lives. It’s minor.”
