RIAA Sues College Students

The Recording Industry of America (RIAA), the music industry's trade group, has brought lawsuits against four college students on the grounds that they were operating Napster-like file sharing services. The RIAA lawsuit identifies the students as being from Princeton University, Michigan Technological University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and that the file sharing services were offering more than one million copies of music that could be illegally downloaded onto their universities' Internet networks. According to the suit, RIAA claims that thousands of songs were stored on a central server that was accessible to students, administrators and others who have access privileges to the universities' networks; the music was downloadable via a standard Web browser. The lawsuits seek maximum damages of $150,000 per song. None of the universities were named as co-defendants, but they are making their own investigations. One of the university presidents expressed anger that the RIAA did not contact the university prior to taking private action against the students, claiming that the university would have taken steps to minimize the distribution of the music on its intranet by taking action of its own. The RIAA said the student had more than 650,000 music files available for downloading as well as music from his own collection, and that it had to take drastic steps to halt the music copyright infringements.

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