The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is taking legal action against three University community members in the latest wave of lawsuits filed in an effort to curtail online music piracy.
The trade group filed 477 lawsuits Wednesday on behalf of its member companies against people it believes to be illegally sharing copyrighted music online.
Purported college piracy
According to an RIAA press release, 69 of those people are users who connected to the Internet from 14 different colleges and universities across the country, including Brown and Michigan State universities.
RIAA Spokesman Jonathan Lamy said the group would not confirm the number of people targeted at each school.
However, University Counsel Clayton Marsh '85 said that three people at Princeton have been cited, according to an email he received Tuesday evening from RIAA president Cary Sherman.
The suits target those "who were sharing illegally hundreds and hundreds of copyrighted songs with millions of strangers on the Internet," Lamy said.
In the last eight months, he said, the RIAA has filed more than 1,000 lawsuits in an attempt to create an environment where online music distributors will have a chance to "compete and flourish."
'John Doe' lawsuits
The industry has recently taken action through "John Doe" lawsuits, which identify defendants solely by their Internet protocol addresses.
At this stage in the process, the RIAA does not know the identities of the people they have sued, Lamy said.
The RIAA will soon request subpoenas that would compel Internet service providers to identify the defendants based on IP addresses. This process usually takes one or two weeks, Lamy said.
The University is not itself a party to the lawsuits, but as the service provider for those Internet users connecting from campus, it would be served the subpoenas and could be compelled to identify the three community members.
"Before complying with any subpoena we will carefully review it to make sure it has been properly issued and served and that it is legally enforceable and otherwise reasonable in nature and scope," Marsh said.
It was one year ago this month that the RIAA filed a lawsuit against Daniel Peng '05 for running the site wake.princeton.edu. Peng settled the suit out of court one month later for $15,000, while denying any wrongdoing.
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