Students who share music files illegally are increasingly at risk for prosecution from the Recording Industry Association of America.
In the wake of the December Verizon Corporation courtroom victory -- in which the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that Internet service providers could not give out the names of their customers without a pending lawsuit -- the RIAA is blindly suing individuals whose identification is yet unknown to them.
Among the Penn community, there has been recent concern about being targeted by the RIAA.
"It seems as if the University is under intense scrutiny at the moment from the RIAA, who is just itching for people to sue," Penn Information Technology Specialist Ian Kelley wrote in a recent e-mail to residents of King's Court/English House.
"If file sharing is playing with fire normally, it's playing with napalm now," Kelley added in the message.
Penn has received numerous IP addresses, dates and times of alleged file sharing incidents, "letting us know we should expect subpoenas ordering us to provide name[s], addresses and telephone numbers of the machine order," said Dave Millar, a University information security officer.
"These subpoenas, if issued, would not have the same legal flaw as those that Verizon successfully contested in December," he added.
Despite the supposed increased threat to file sharers at Penn, at this point no students have been sued. Penn officials have said that little has changed to make students more likely to be sued than before.
Still, "over the past few months, we've been getting e-mails from the RIAA that we may be getting subpoenas," said Robert Terrell, an intellectual property lawyer with Penn's General Counsel.
"If the lawsuits are in proper form, Penn will be under legal obligation to hand over the information," Terrell said. "And we will do it."
Under the old system, the RIAA took evidence of file sharing to court where a clerk could issue a subpoena. Once obtained, the organization petitioned the user's Internet service provider for his or her contact information, which had to be legally handed over.
The RIAA used this information to send a letter to the alleged user, warning him or her of the illegal activity and offering a method of settling out of a suit.
Since the December Verizon victory, the RIAA is no longer allowed to send this letter in advance. The only way to legally sue file sharers is via the "John Doe" system. Once an anonymous IP has been sued, the person's ISP is required to hand over personal information so that his or her identity can be revealed.
Under the new system, by the time the RIAA has a name, a lawsuit has already been filed.
The bottom line is [that] everyone, including students, can be held accountable. There is no longer any excuse for getting music illegally," RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy said.
