yikes! u.w. students to be hearing from r.i.a.a., increasing student loan balances?
Oh, boy — the University of Washington is about to start playing nice with the Recording Industry Association of America. As a “service to students”, they will be turning over individual names so that students will have the opportunity to pay thousands of dollars to settle allegations of illegal downloading out of court. From a letter apparently sent to all students [uw.lj] from the Vice Provost for Student Life: :
… The University has been notified by the RIAA that we will be receiving a number
of these early settlement letters. After careful consideration, we have decided
to forward the letters to the alleged copyright violators. We do so primarily
because we believe students should have the opportunity to avail themselves of
the settlement option if they so choose. Not forwarding the RIAA letter to
students could result in their being served with a lawsuit, with no chance to
settle it beforehand. … [uw.lj]
not necessarily related: Two years ago, the University entered into a one-year relationship with Napster to provide legal downloads to residence hall students [register]. The following year, they partnered with something called Ctrax [#] and opened it to the entire UW community. Both services, primarily tethered-download based and only available on Windows, have since been discontinued.
update: Based on the discussion in the comments, I was planning to e-mail the U.W. for clarification on their level of co-operation with the R.I.A.A., but it looks like this statement to the Post-Intelligencer answers the main questions (maybe they saw this post and the related conversation and decided to follow-up for us!):
“The university is not going to give information about the students to the industry,” spokesman Robert Roseth said.
But, he added, the school will pass along letters from the Recording Industry Association of America to UW students accused of illegal downloading. [p-i]
So, it looks like R.I.A.A. won’t get the student contact information unless they decide to take the case to court. This still doesn’t answer the question of why the University is passing along the letters now instead of waiting for a court order, but it does clarify the issue a little bit.
An important clarification: the email says that they will be forwarding the RIAA letters to students, not that they will be passing the students’ names back to the RIAA. (It doesn’t say they won’t be sending that info to the RIAA, though, so it’s probably worth writing to the address at the end of the letter posted to uw.lj and asking.)
Er. I’m a different Josh than the one who posted the entry I’m responding to.
Hrm. That’s an interesting point. I guess that I’d assumed that for the R.I.A.A. to offer a student a settlement letter, they would need his or her name and address.
I’m pretty sure the way it works is that the RIAA sends the ISP (the UW, in this case) a bunch of letters with IP addresses and times, and it’s up to the ISP to determine who the person behind that IP at that time is, and forward the letter along.
There are a few ways the UW could have responded, having been notified that the RIAA was going to be sending them those letters:
A) Tell the RIAA to go piss up a rope; if they want to sue UW students, they’ll have to get information about who to sue from the UW via subpoena.
B) Do the RIAA’s dirty work in determining who the RIAA would like to extort money from, and forward the letters to the students.
C) The same as B, but also tell the RIAA the results of looking up who was connected to those IPs at those times.
Option C is clearly bad, and I’m pretty certain that without a court order to do so, they’d fall afoul of all sorts of laws about student confidentiality. I would be very surprised indeed if they were doing this.
I’d prefer they had chosen option A, and I’d like to hear more from them about the decision process there, because their stated reason isn’t doing it for me:
The problem is that the FAQ at the settlement site says this:
If the UW had chosen option A, students would still be getting their settlement offer, but only after the RIAA had gotten their legal team to extract the students’ information from the UW. And I don’t think that would be as simple as they make it sound in that FAQ.
So why they chose B is something I’d really like to hear more about.
The U.W. statement to the P-I clarifies things a bit — you’re right in assuming that they’re using “option B”. I sent an e-mail to the Vice Provost for Student Life to see if they had further comment on the issue and will update if I hear from them.
If UW chooses Option A, the university will be sued under DMCA. Repeatedly. And the university doesn’t have the money to adequately defend itself against the suits.
The only way it could would be to raise tuition dramatically.
Also, the university isn’t releasing user data to the RIAA unless there is a subpoena. Privacy laws come into play there. But under subpoena the university will release the data.
But these aren’t DMCA takedown requests, DW. We (I work there too) honor those, as we have to, in order to fall under the safe harbor provisions. We don’t have to point alleged infringers to a site where they can volunteer their identity and admit guilt without due process, and give the RIAA their credit card number. I’m not saying we shouldn’t release information when it’s subpoena’d. Do you subscribe to the techsupport mailing list? I expanded on my thoughts there.
Or I could just repost my mailing list comment to my own blog, and link to it.
Yeah Josh, your e-mail came in about a minute after I left for the day.
And no, it’s not DMCA, but it reads like if UW doesn’t comply, the RIAA will start subpoenaing the user records. And having been around a lot of UW legal kerfluffles recently, I’m just not sure this is a line the university can afford to take.
It would be good if they did, obviously, and numerous other universities have told the RIAA no. But again, this university is already pumping too much money through the AG’s office.
But what’s the harm to the UW if the RIAA does start subpoenaing the user records? The UW doesn’t have to fight the subpoena–that’s more than I’m asking for. If they get a valid and legal request for the user records, they should honor it. And anyway, passing the letter from the RIAA to the student doesn’t guarantee that the UW won’t get a subpoena for that information.
I’m not asking that the UW take the RIAA to court to stop them going after UW students, and I’m not asking that the UW go to court to stop having to comply with subpoenas. I’m just asking that, instead of implicitly endorsing the RIAA’s tactics by playing along, they let students know when they’ve come under investigation, but not act on the RIAA’s behalf until compelled to by law.