Last fall, Wharton freshman Livaskio David received an unexpected e-mail in his inbox.
It said "We have traced your IP server address. We know that you are engaging in illegal activities and are downloading through LimeWire," David remembered.
Columbia Records sent the e-mail, supposedly in collaboration with the University. The letter demanded that David stop downloading illegally, delete LimeWire and send back a list of all the songs he had downloaded.
The experience was enough to make David quit illegal downloading for good.
David is just one among millions of young music-lovers who are going legal with their music downloading.
The lawsuits are part of a fierce Recording Industry Association of America publicity campaign against users of programs like Kazaa, Grokster, WinMX, Gnutella and LimeWire. The RIAA's program of random lawsuits against individuals is designed to frighten illegal file-sharers and emphasize their message that file-sharing is ethically wrong.
As RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy put it, "It is intentionally random."
Thus far, more than 8,400 individuals have been sued, including eight at Penn.
"On a routine basis, we are scanning these networks and tracking these individuals," Lamy said.
"It's especially important for us to educate [students] about the law, the harm suffered by musicians, labels and retailers alike when music is stolen," an RIAA press release said.
The RIAA claims that the recording industry loses $4.2 billion every year because of illegal file sharing.
College campuses represent a crucial battleground in the fight over file sharing. A 2000 study conducted by Ipsos-Reid found that 18- to 24-year-olds download more music than any other age group.
In its two most recent rounds of lawsuits, the RIAA singled out the names of colleges where individuals were being sued. The lists included 29 colleges, including Penn, Columbia, Westchester, Harvard Medical School, Southern Mississippi and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
The media campaign appears to be succeeding, as overall illegal downloading decreased for the first time in the 2004. Since the RIAA launched its first lawsuits against individual file-sharers in September 2003, the number of people downloading music online has dropped from 35 to 18 million, according to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
The Pew study found that the largest declines in illegal downloading are among those with a college education, parents with underage children and women. Downloading decreased by more than 50 percent among those groups.
Scared by lawsuits
The RIAA's media barrage made a significant impact on Engineering freshman Erica Chalmers. Until last May, Chalmers downloaded illegally on a regular basis. With the BearShare file-sharing program, she downloaded over 1,000 tracks from her favorite bands, such as Korn, Garbage and the Smashing Pumpkins.
But like many downloaders, she was becoming increasingly concerned with the possibility that she could be sued for her file sharing.
"There was always that worry of getting caught," Chalmers said. "It wasn't so prevalent until that time."
When she received an iPod as a high school graduation present, Chalmers decided it was time to stop. She deleted BearShare and switched to iTunes, a downloading service made by Apple that allows users to legally download music for 99 cents per song.
Instead of cramping her music tastes, iTunes has increased Chalmers' interest in music.
"Actually, I listen to it more now," she said.
'Hurting the bands'
Others students have quit file sharing for strictly ethical reasons.
The RIAA's message that illegal downloading hurts musicians struck a chord with College freshman Evan Richter. A classic rock fan, Richter had used Kazaa to download thousands of songs by his favorites, bands like The Who, The Grateful Dead and Neil Young.
Richter considers himself a serious music fan. He says that he has attended more than 50 concerts in his lifetime. For him, the decision to stop downloading was about protecting the bands he loves.
"All these bands have based most of their revenue on record sales. By downloading illegally, I'm hurting the bands I like. One day enough downloading could stop bands from making music," Richter said.
Like Chalmers, Richter has switched to iTunes. In the past year, he too has bought more than 1,000 songs from iTunes. Richter says that going legal hasn't affected his listening habits and that he still spends just as much time enjoying music as he used to.
Legal Services
Of many emerging programs that allow users to purchase songs and albums for download, iTunes is the most popular. Other well-known online music catalogs include Napster 2.0 (revamped into a legal downloading service) and Musicmatch. Some other programs, such as Rhapsody, provide a certain number of songs on a subscription basis.
Despite some reports questioning how much profit the services will eventually be able to reap, the digital music business is quickly being flooded by new companies. Corporate giants like Microsoft, Coca-Cola and even Wal-Mart, which were at first slow to react to the downloading craze, have thrown their hats into the ring.
According to one study, music fans legally downloaded more than 200 million songs last year, increasing the value of the music-downloading industry to $330 million. And while that represents only approximately 1.5 percent of the music industry's total revenue, the same study predicts that downloading could make up 25 percent of that revenue in five years. Other studies, such as one conducted by Jupiter Research in December 2004, however, have placed that figure only between 10 and 15 percent.
In some cases, legal programs are becoming so widespread and easy to use that downloaders are switching over for purely practical reasons.
Elizabeth Lovett, a junior in the College, switched to iTunes six months ago.
"It became really easy to download single songs without paying for the whole CD," she said.
Downloading from older peer-to-peer programs like Kazaa is becoming increasingly difficult. Users must hope that their desired song is available, navigate between real and fake files -- known as spoofs -- and be able to establish a fast connection.
Programs like iTunes and Napster are designed to make digital music downloading easy -- albeit with a price.
Songs available for download are presented in a simple, straightforward interface. The download speed is also much faster, since users don't have to deal with the inconveniences of a peer-to-peer network. Listening to streaming music can occur almost instantly.
However, the main drawback of these services -- besides price -- continues to be portability. Songs downloaded from legal music downloading services are in special formats that limit the number of computers on which files can be played and the number of times music can be burned to CD. Also, users who subscribe to streaming services often have to pay extra to be able to transfer their music to portable devices, such as an iPod.
And though maybe only audiophiles would notice, music from downloading services is not as high in quality as music from a CD.
Whatever the reasons, the campaigns seem to be working. Atudents like David, Chalmers, Richter and Lovett are joining the legal downloading craze, and thousands of others like them are joining, too.
"It's just more efficient," Chalmers said.
