The Recording Industry Association of America, which began its effort to eradicate illegal downloading last year, announced Thursday it has reinvigorated its effort with the start of the new academic year.
UW-Madison is among 22 universities nationwide to receive a new wave of pre-litigation settlement letters - o - o62 of which were sent to UW System students - o - oas part of the most recent installment of the RIAA's comprehensive anti-piracy campaign.
The campaign, which targeted 16 individual UW - oMadison students last spring, identifies individuals based on excessive downloads that are traced by the university to a given Internet Protocol address.
Cara Duckworth, spokesperson of the RIAA, said earlier this month that the organization captures evidence of illegal file sharing on university networks.
We use that information to serve as basis of a lawsuit, but before we file anything, we send a letter to a university and ask them to forward that letter onto the appropriate user.""
These letters offer an alternative ""discount rate"" resolution for the students' copyright infringement claims. Should the students choose to pay this discount rate, which the RIAA describes to be less expensive than the total cost of the actual pirated material, the students will be excused from further legal action.
However, should students choose to ignore these letters, the fine will be raised until the student is required to appear in court.
According to a statement, the RIAA file-sharing crack down would free up ""the amount of usable network bandwidth"" at the university.
Brian Rust, communications manager for UW-Madison Division of Information Technology, refutes this claim.
""Network capacity and storage is not an issue because the music isn't stored on any machines that the university owns,"" Rust said.
""[RIAA] have overstated what a favor they are doing for the university by pursuing these students. What would really help the university is if the RIAA reimbursed us for all the expenses that we have had to incur to process these letters.""
Rust added that the university received a congressional survey earlier this year in which it estimated piracy expenditures.
""We estimated that we spent $300,000 on behalf of the RIAA to not only process these letters, but also proactively do promotions,"" Rust said.
""We produce posters and send out mass emails, which we were doing long before the RIAA started to crack down on universities and these students.""
According to a statement, more than half of college students download music and movies illegally, amounting to 1.3 billion illegal music downloads in 2006.
