After more than five years of pushing legislation against college students who are found illegally downloading music, the Recording Industry Association of America has effectively ceased action against universities, reports the Wall Street Journal.
In recent years the music industry began falling victim to the Internet thanks to the surge of Napster, Kazaa and other similar sites and programs. Young users and college students specifically were the RIAA’s first and largest group of legal targets.
“We are discontinuing our broad-based litigation program against individuals,” said Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the RIAA. The association still plans to take action against customers who are found guilty of repeatedly downloading music illegally.
The big difference is that rather than go through colleges such as UCLA and unfairly targeting college students, the RIAA now hopes to work with commercial Internet-service providers to track down guilty individuals.
Colleges across the country, such as Cornell University, applauded this drastic change. This was especially important following years of stories about students across the country who were hit with thousands of dollars in fines from the recording industry and sometimes were subsequently forced to drop out of school to pay these fines.
UCLA, for example, tried to push a legal music-sharing campaign called “Get Legal” that offered students a way to still participate in the act of sharing music with fellow students.
Although pushed heavily by UCLA in 2007, Get Legal could not match the popularity of its less-restrictive predecessors. Get Legal’s programs only offered streaming music rather than music files available for use on portable music devices such as iPods.
Thus, they did not meet the needs and desires of a younger generation that instead turned to cheaper ““ usually free ““ music downloads of poor and illegal quality.
Since then, UCLA and others were forced to act as mediators between record companies and guilty students rather than focusing on more important matters such as administration and education.
Because record companies were only able to find the IP addresses of illegal downloaders and not names of particular individuals, they could not press charges.
The university, however, requires a log-in for the wireless network and records IP addresses with the names of users. This system gave record companies an easy way to track downloading on college campuses.
Illegal downloading should not be condoned, but starving college students should not be the main target of such prosecution. Rather, the sites that provide the platform for music sharing should be at fault as well.
Not only does this move benefit universities, but this change of focus should benefit the RIAA’s efforts to fight illegal downloading in the long-run. Going through Internet service providers should prove to be a much more direct, as well as less-criticized, method for finding suspect and guilty individuals.
The current state of the economy as well as the continuing prevalence of portable music devices such as the iPod, means the days of illegal downloading are far from over.
However, leveling the field for finding guilty parties is a huge step forward for college students everywhere.