The Recording Industry Association of America announced yesterday 50 people at Boston University found illegally downloading music will receive pre-litigation settlement letters, which offer cited offenders a chance to settle with the RIAA without having to go to court.
BU tops the list of 23 campuses that will receive letters from the RIAA in the second wave of pre-litigation offers, in which 405 students and faculty received letters. The first wave of letters was sent Feb. 28, and the letters will become a monthly practice, according to the RIAA.
BU spokesman Colin Riley said the announcement does not come as a surprise.
“We’re aware. We know what they have said and we haven’t seen [the letters] yet,” he said.
The letters represent continued efforts by the RIAA on behalf of major record companies to crack down on students illegally filesharing on college campuses. The RIAA letters are sent directly to university officials, notifying them that a student or staff member has been illegally downloading files on their network and will face a lawsuit unless the violator agrees to pay a lesser fee out of court that will not go on the offender’s record.
Riley said university officials are discussing the course of action they will take and will decide whether to forward the settlement letters to cited offenders when the BU General Counsel’s Office receives the first set of letters.
The association has reached agreements with 116 of the 400 violators who received letters last month and is in the process of finalizing many more, said RIAA Communications Director Jenni Engebretsen. The RIAA will soon begin filing lawsuits against those who have not responded.
Students have 20 days to agree to a pre-litigation settlement, but they do not know the amount of the settlement until after they agree to it, she said. Any school that decides not to forward the settlement offers to the cited offenders will only be hurting them because they will wind up getting sued, Engebretsen said.
“It would be unfortunate that students would lose the chance to settle these off the record and at a discounted price,” she said.
The University of Wisconsin campus system, which was also told it would receive letters last month, received 66 letters for students in the latest wave, but the university said it is refusing to forward the letters to cited students.
Brian Rust, senior administration programming specialist of information technology at the university, said although the school is legally bound under the Digital Millenium Securities Act to forward cease-and-desist notices — messages from the RIAA that tell students they have been caught downloading illegally and must delete the files — and comply with subpoenas, there is no existing provision requiring schools to forward any notice or request from the RIAA, including pre-litigation settlement letters.
“The RIAA is trying to make this a university issue, and it’s not a university issue,” he said, accusing the RIAA of over-publicizing its campaign against college students as it quietly raises suits against customers of other Internet service providers as well.
Rust said the university, which encourages students to cooperate with the RIAA, does not want to create the impression it is working with the RIAA.
“It is really unclear what our role might be in being complicit in these settlements,” he said. “If we forwarded these notices to individual students, it might look like we were working with the RIAA to more or less require them to pay these fees.
“If they want to pursue some sort of settlement, they will have to do it through the courts,” he said, adding senior university officials will stand by their decision under pressure. “There is a legal process [the RIAA] needs to go through to do that.”
Rust noted the school is not ignoring RIAA requests to defend its students’ illegal filesharing habits.
“We’ve decided to take the position that one notice is enough,” he said. “Unless [students] stop what they have been doing, the RIAA has every right to issue a subpoena to them.”
Some other schools, including North Dakota State University and the University of Nebraska, are refusing to forward the pre-litigation offers to students, Rust said.
Staff reporter Andrew FitzGerald contributed reporting for this article.