Music industry sues students for alleged piracy

By Jon Healey
Los Angeles Times

The major record companies intensified their attack on piracy yesterday, suing four students at three universities who allegedly operated Napster-like music-copying services on their campus computer network.

The students — one at Princeton University, one at Michigan Technological University and two at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute — each could face tens of millions of dollars in penalties for allegedly operating the services and redistributing copyrighted music.

The lawsuits are a new and far more punitive tactic for the Recording Industry Association of America, which previously relied on campus officials to stop piracy by students.

"The seriousness of this problem requires us to act quickly and send a loud and clear message that this kind of activity is illegal and has consequences," RIAA President Cary Sherman said.

But several academic officials faulted the RIAA for not working through the three universities to address the problem without filing headline-grabbing lawsuits.

"Had you followed the previous methods established in notification of a violation, we would have shut off the student and not allowed the problem to grow to the size and scope that it is today," Michigan Tech President Curtis J. Tompkins said in a letter to Sherman.

The lawsuits are the latest signal of the labels' more aggressive tactics against individuals who use file-sharing networks. But their efforts have been delayed by a dispute over their use of subpoenas to force Internet providers to identify customers who use file-sharing networks.

Court and university records identify the students as Daniel Peng, a sophomore at Princeton in Princeton, N.J.; Joseph Nievelt, an undergraduate computer science student at Michigan Tech in Houghton, Mich.; Jesse Jordan, a freshman information-technology student at RPI in Troy, N.Y.; and Aaron Sherman, a senior management student at RPI. Peng declined to talk about the case. The other students did not respond to requests for comment.

The suits accuse the four of hijacking their campus computer networks to make it easier for fellow students to copy and redistribute copyrighted songs. Each allegedly set up a site on the network that indirectly infringed copyrights by providing a computerized index of songs stored on each others' computers.

The complaints ask for the maximum damages of $150,000 for each infringement.