Welcome to week two of the two-part guide to the Recording Industry of America's campaign against the sharing of music files on the Internet. Last week's column gave a brief history of the battle between several of the world's largest music labels and services like Napster. I highlighted the changes that led to suits being brought against individual downloaders, old people and the deceased.
This week's column will look more closely at the particular effects of the campaign on college students ,as well as offer some modest advice that in no way makes me legally liable for your fate.
Though the RIAA has filed approximately 13,000 lawsuits against file-sharers so far in its effort to discourage free music downloading, their deterrence campaign has been just about as ineffective as any other such campaign in the history of bad strategies. For further information see nuclear deterrence, the use of the death penalty as a deterrent and any number of child psychology books.
In fact, the number of people sharing files on the Internet continues to rise each year, as the growing popularity of cable modems makes downloading faster and easier for more people.
Though hundreds of new lawsuits are filed every month, the percentage of the roughly 60 million file-sharers that have not been sued (troublingly calculated as 100 percent by my awful business calculator) continue on, armed with the same combination of boundless optimism and the \it-won't-happen-to-me"" mindset that lets us all forget the risks of driving, while still buying lottery tickets.
For college students the deal is even sweeter. Though we make up a disproportionately large group of the file-sharing community, thanks to incredibly fast connections in dorms and very little spending money, the RIAA has, for the most part, focused its attention elsewhere. Until March, only 4 percent of the total number of those sued were students.
If you have been getting a little skittish lately, dreading the day when you may find a subpoena in your mailbox stapled to a list of all 300 live recordings of Phish on your computer, don't worry; the industry has found a way to further prey on your fear. Offering amnesty to repentant file-sharers, the RIAA claims that downloaders who turn themselves in and sign a form swearing they have deleted all downloaded files from their computers will be spared when the four labels of the RIAA come down from on high waving the terrible sword of copyright law.
However, you may want to think twice before signing up. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (which has a dandy website for this sort of thing) the amnesty offer does not protect you from being prosecuted in criminal court, nor does it protect you from the RIAA or the individual labels that comprise the RIAA in the case that you are ""already under investigation."" Never say that label executives are not tricky bastards.
Possibly doubting the effectiveness of their amnesty campaign, the RIAA has begun putting pressure on colleges themselves to curb the use of school Internet connections for downloading music. If you've ever been kicked off the network for exceeding your maximum bandwidth usage or wondered why Limewire runs at a crawl in your dorm room, you can thank the same people that released that awful last Offspring album.
Where once programs like MyTunes allowed for lightning-fast downloads from the libraries of hundreds of other music fans, pressure on Apple (which relies on the benediction of the labels of the RIAA to run its iTunes music store) has led to newer versions of iTunes being incompatible with programs that ""piggy-back"" off of its services. This makes for a strong case against upgrading iTunes, despite a fix to the ""Party Shuffle"" feature that stops it from picking Elliot Smith songs and the beta version of the new ""Makeout Shuffle,"" which automatically screens out Rage Against the Machine and Slint's ""Nosferatu Man.""
So there you have it. You know the history of this whole ugly business and some of the risks that file sharing brings with it. Now if you'll excuse me, my laptop and I will be seeking asylum in Cuba.
Matt Hunziker plans on using Cuba's super fine cable internet system to continue downloading and answer his e-mail at hunziker@wisc.edu.
