To the Editor:

Over the course of the year I have read many articles in The Hustler regarding Internet piracy and file sharing. The Recording Industry Association of America busted 20 Vanderbilt students recently with notifications to either go to court or settle by paying several thousand dollars.

In fact, this has been done at colleges all over the country in the last year. While such offers may seem benevolent on the part of the recording industry, I’m surprised no one has pointed out how illegal this is. What the recording industry is doing is extortion, abusing their power to obtain funds through threats. By threatening to take the case to court unless payments are made otherwise, the RIAA is hindering due process as required by law.

On top of this, there are other issues I have with the RIAA. I do not condone illegal downloading, but I disagree with the route the RIAA has chosen to take in combating it. Most people do not know how the RIAA traces illegal downloads, and their First Amendment rights are being violated in the process. First, the RIAA hires a team of programmers to find random MP3s on file sharing networks and put trackers on them. For example, the team may decide to put a tracker on “Sk8er Boi” by Avril Lavigne. The programmers will download the song to verify that the song is actually “Sk8er Boi.” If the file turns out to be legitimate, they’ll encode some scripts on the MP3 to log every Internet Protocal address that attempts to access the file. Certain programs prevent the collection of this data.

After the IP addresses are verified, the RIAA sends complaints to Internet service providers. ISPs ignore most complaints, but the RIAA frequently threatens to sue the ISP unless action is taken. In the case of Vanderbilt, when the RIAA sends a complaint, ITS will cut the connection of whichever IP address they identify as the violator. According to the ITS Web site, Vanderbilt neither monitors nor truly cares what its students download. The university only suggests its students download in a legal manner.

The real problem is not piracy as much as it is the RIAA itself. The RIAA is a “non-profit” and tax-free organization. With the biggest recording labels in America backing the organization, why not evade taxes? Moreover, the four biggest record labels in the country — SonyBMG, Warner Bros., Universal and EMI — engage in price fixing and use their clout to regulate the music industry heavily. This is against American anti-trust laws and meets the definition of a cartel in economic theory. The RIAA claims to be acting in the best interest of artists, but artists never see the money collected from these extortions. The money instead goes to fund the RIAA’s lawyers and other “legal fees.”

Furthermore, the RIAA has no real evidence when it offers these out-of-court settlements. Why else would the RIAA offer to settle in the first place unless the cartel knew there was a good chance they could lose in court? When the programming teams collect IP addresses, they don’t have any evidence other than the IP addresses. Imagine going to court with the prosecutors having only a list of numbers as evidence. There have been cases where alleged illegal downloaders won against the RIAA claiming that IP addresses don’t verify names. In these precious few cases, the RIAA was forced to pay the legal fees and the stories were swept under the rug, never to be heard of again.

The RIAA claims downloaders are ripping off artists, but the RIAA itself only pays artists pennies per CD sold. When an artist signs onto a major record label, the amount of money he or she will be paid is listed in the contract. This salary is guaranteed by contract and does not depend on record sales. This is why only the RIAA is waging a war against consumers; the artists don’t really care.

Overall, the RIAA is simply not fighting this problem the right way. For example, the RIAA never mentions iTunes as a legal means of acquiring music. Instead of suing its own customers, the RIAA should be figuring out how it can use peer-to-peer programs to its advantage and how to make money from this technological advance. CDs and physical media are becoming a technology of the past. The RIAA needs a reality check, and they must realize lawsuits are not a good substitute for lost sales.

Keegan Gabel
Freshman, A&S