Students settle lawsuits with recording industry
- — 05 May, 2003 10:54
Four university students have reached settlements in music piracy lawsuits filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
The RIAA sued the four students separately last month for sharing copyright material and for operating on-campus, Napster-like file-swapping services designed to search for music on connected school network computers.
Under the terms of the settlements this week, Jesse Jordan and Aaron Sherman, students from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, agreed to pay US$12,000 and $17,000 respectively, the RIAA announced Friday. Princeton University’s Daniel Peng and Michigan Technological University’s Joseph Nievelt will pay the RIAA $15,000 each.
The amounts owed will be collected by the RIAA in annual increments between 2003 and 2006. The students are also expected to disable the Web sites that allowed campus users to download songs and files from school network computers.
The RIAA said that the trade group was pleased that the cases, first made public in early April, were settled quickly.
In the Friday statement, Senior Vice-President of Business and Legal Affairs Matt Oppenheim said the RIAA is confident that the defendants will not engage in the type of file-swapping for which they were sued, and that they clearly understand the seriousness with which the group views that type of conduct.
The lawsuit marks the first of its kind in which the RIAA has sued individual users, historically going after file-sharing services like Napster, which conduct the majority of illegal file-swapping. Napster itself was put out of business by an RIAA lawsuit.
Originally, the Association was looking for damages payable up to $150,000 per song. In Friday’s statement, the group said it believes the settlement amounts are appropriate, but warned that in future cases, it may not be as lenient and could enforce stiffer settlement obligations to individuals.
"We have also sent a clear signal to others that this kind of activity is illegal," Oppenheim said in the statement. "The message is clearly getting through that distributing copyrighted works without permission is illegal, can have consequences and that we will move quickly and aggressively to enforce our rights."
Since filing the initial suit against the four students, at least 18 similar campus file-sharing services have come down without the RIAA having to issue further lawsuits, according to the statement.
