Getting Sued For Sharing

Some Harvard undergraduates have found themselves among the hundreds of college students targeted by lawsuits that aimed to curtail the piracy of copyrighted material through online file sharing.

Both the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed copyright infringement lawsuits against students at colleges and universities nationwide who allegedly engaged in illegal file sharing.

Both organizations used “John Doe” lawsuits for the litigation, meaning that they filed lawsuits against individuals whom they only knew by an IP address. They then obtained the names of the defendants by subpoenaing the colleges and universities that the alleged pirates attend.

By mid-March, Harvard had received at least one “pre-subpoena letter” from the RIAA warning that the University would likely have to reveal one or more such names.

Robert Mitchell, director of communications for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), told The Crimson at that time that the University does not disclose the names of students whose IP addresses are implicated in illegal file sharing under normal circumstances. But he said Harvard does comply with subpoenas requiring it to do so.

He also said that students’ records and academic standing would not be affected by legal action related to file sharing but that the University had no say in the RIAA’s decision of whether to pursue a particular case in court. Students must agree to obey copyright law in order to gain access to the University network.

‘2’ SHARE OR NOT ‘2’ SHARE

In April, the RIAA announced plans to file 405 new lawsuits against college students, including 11 at Harvard. This litigation specifically targeted users of Internet2, a special network used by academic institutions.

The April defendants, who attended 18 colleges and universities around the country, were accused of using a program called “i2hub” to illegally share copyrighted material through high-speed uploading and downloading over Internet2. According to an RIAA press release, they were responsible for sharing an average of over 2,300 “mp3” music files each. Some users, it said, have shared up to 3,600 such files.

RIAA spokeswoman Jenni R. Engebretsen told The Crimson on the day the lawsuits were filed that the defendants were “the most egregious users of Internet2.” She said the litigation was meant to “attract the attention” of other file-sharing users and discourage them from continuing to pirate copyrighted material.

Just before the Internet2 lawsuits were filed in April, RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a telephone press conference that some students believed using Internet2 would prevent their illegal behavior from being detected, but stressed that this notion was erroneous.

“Internet2 is increasingly becoming the network of choice for students seeking to steal copyrighted songs and other works on a massive scale,” Sherman said in April. “With this action, we are putting students and users everywhere on notice that there are consequences to illegal uses of this special network.”

MOTION PICTURE PIRACY

Immediately following in the RIAA’s footsteps, the MPAA also filed lawsuits against college students at 12 universities in April.

While the RIAA suits focused on cases of alleged music piracy, the MPAA targeted users who it believed were responsible for illegally sharing movies online. Like the RIAA, the MPAA cited “i2hub” as especially problematic.

No Harvard students were defendants in the MPAA’s April lawsuits, but Bernards said the litigation was meant to send a message to anyone illegally sharing movies online.

“A lot of people who are stealing movies over the Internet think that they’re anonymous, and the more we point out that they’re not, the less likely they are to do it,” she said in April.

LAWSUITS: ROUND ‘2’

In late May, the RIAA announced a second set of lawsuits against college students allegedly using Internet2 to pirate music online. Of the 33 schools whose students were targeted in this round of litigation, 20 had not been included in the first set of suits.

A press release issued at the time said “the RIAA has significantly expanded the scope of its response to this egregious form of music theft popular on college campuses.”

Jonathan L. Zittrain, the Berkman assistant professor of entrepreneurial legal studies at Harvard Law School (HLS) and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, writes in an e-mail that copyright infringement lawsuits for online file sharing have “become genuinely routine” this year.

But “in some ways the year was notable...for the questions that remain unanswered,” he writes, adding that no file sharing lawsuit has yet gone to court because each case has ended in a settlement and that “publishers have refrained from outright suing universities or commercial internet service providers for ‘contributory’ copyright infringement arising from the activities taking place on their networks.”

John G. Palfrey ’94, executive director of the Berkman Center and a lecturer at HLS, writes in an e-mail that this year’s lawsuits against file sharers have shown that copyright holders are serious about protecting their material.

“Some observers thought that the RIAA would just make its statement with a few high-profile lawsuits against students and then back off,” he writes. “That has not been the case.”

“The copyright holders have made it plain this year that they intend to keep the heat on students and others they believe to be infringers, with the number of suits filed now headed into the tens of thousands,” he says. “The copyright holders also made clear that just switching to a new network, like [Internet2], isn’t going to get you off the hook.”

And college students seem to be getting the message.

“The RIAA and MPAA have succeeded in one sense: they’ve raised awareness among those who might be inclined to infringe that they stand a real risk of getting sued,” Palfrey writes. “The Internet is not an anonymous place.”

—Staff writer Matthew S. Lebowitz can be reached at mslebow@fas.harvard.edu.