Four students cited for illegal file sharing

By Richard Nieva

Four Santa Clara students who have yet to be identified or notified were cited for illegal file sharing two weeks ago by the Recording Industry Association of America and may face subpoenas or settlements ranging from $2,500 to $30,000, said Ron Danielson, vice provost for information services and chief information officer.

"We've gotten these notices to preserve evidence, and that usually is a precursor to these offers of settlement," said Danielson. "That means potentially four people on this campus are at financial risk."

The four preservation notices issued by the RIAA requested the university preserve its network records, should the association decide to sue the students for copyright violations.

Information Technology has not yet attempted to identify the individual students or give them the notices. IT is first talking to university attorneys to find out what its obligations are and what they recommend, IT Director Carl Fussell said. The university will take careful action when dealing with the RIAA, he added.

"We wouldn't do anything along those lines without having our attorney standing right by our side to make sure what we're doing is legal," Fussell said. "We don't want to give them more information than we need to give them, either."

In addition to the four preservation notices this year, IT has received a record number of Digital Millennium Copyright Act notes -- a preliminary step to the preservation note that indicates the RIAA has detected an individual's illegal activity and is calling on the university to make it stop.

Danielson projects that IT will probably end up with four to five times the amount of DMCA notes it received last year. Danielson said he will be looking for settlement offers in about a week for the four students that received preservation notices. If a student receives a settlement, they can do three basic things: pay it, ignore it or hire a lawyer. If a student chooses to ignore the offer, the university will likely be sent a subpoena asking to identify the student.

"We will do that," said Danielson. "We have already decided we will comply with the subpoena."

As of today, no subpoenas have been issued for Santa Clara students. Subpoenas rarely lead to actual court cases. Most file sharing violators opt to accept settlements, which typically range from $2,500 to $30,000, but can be as high as $150,000.

In the early stages of detection, the university handles file sharing offenses internally. IT makes sure the offense is on university record, but since it is dealt with as an internal rather than legal matter, the first file sharing offense is more comparable to a disciplinary citation, , Fussell said.

When a student is detected, his or her network access is shut off, and the network is cleaned out of any illegal peer-to-peer file sharing software. After it is wiped clean, network access is again turned on. His or her name is then given to the dean of students.

The students then meet with IT for what both Fussell and Danielson described as a "teachable moment," where the staff tries to make the student aware of the moral implications of his or her actions.

"Students who get caught will probably never do it again," said Peter Kirst, a freshman caught illegally sharing files earlier this year. "That firm warning from the dean was enough for me."

Kirst was caught downloading episodes of the NBC show, "Heroes." He said the show's official Web site streams full episodes free to viewers. The only setback -- just like watching the episode when it airs on television -- is that there are commercials embedded throughout the streaming.

Kirst went to another Web site that offered the same episode commercial free. For him, it was about convenience. Freshman Molly Doell said paying for some songs just doesn't make sense because she is motivated by nostalgia. From time to time, an old song will pop into her head, and she will download it.

"I'm not going to pay 99 cents for a song I'm probably only going to listen to once. I'm not going to pay for a memory," said Doell.

But Fussell said the DMCA notes IT is getting now are almost exclusively targeting a single item, a single song, a single video.

Fussell stressed that it is more than just a simple matter of copyright, dollars and cents. "One of the things the university prides itself on, and the reason people come here, is the whole education of a person," Fussell said. "There are moral components, ethical components, to everything we do."

To date, the university has had no repeat offenders.

According to Fussell, David Hughes, senior vice president of technology for the RIAA, said at a conference that the association did take a more educational approach earlier on in their file sharing crackdown.

Originally, the RIAA invested millions in a campaign that included advertising, literature and videos about the detriment of illegally sharing files.

At the conference, Hughes said that this garnered little to no results. However, when the RIAA started to use the legal system to support them, it started seeing changes.

"This is not our preferred course, but we hope that students will understand the consequences of stealing music and that our partners in the college community will appreciate the proactive role they can play," said President of the RIAA Cary Sherman in a March 21 press release.

Contact Richard Nieva at (408) 554-4546 or rnieva@scu.edu.