Previous Henry Jenkins, Prominent New-Media Scholar, to Leave MIT for U. of Southern California |
Next Text-Based Computer Game Features Graduate Student as Main Character |
November 18, 2008, 03:20 PM ET
Faced With RIAA Legal Fees, Some Students Drop Out of College
Colleges have taken different approaches to the recording industry’s anti-piracy campaign. Some have begun quickly erasing network-access logs, or refused to forward the industry’s settlement demands to students, or fought the industry’s subpoenas. Others have taken a different tack, trying to deter students from illegal file sharing by limiting their bandwidth, barring peer-to-peer programs from campus networks, stepping up education programs, promoting legal options like Napster or Ruckus, or seeking out pirates and blocking their Internet connections.
But students still pay to settle would-be lawsuits by the Recording Industry Association of America, and that financial hit may mean they have to drop out of college, said Jodi Thesing-Ritter, associate dean of student development at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire.
Ms. Thesing-Ritter mentioned dropouts in a recent article in The Spectator, Eau Claire’s campus newspaper.
Twenty-six students there got subpoenas from the RIAA in the spring of 2007, Ms. Thesing-Ritter told The Chronicle, and two “did not return to school because of their fees.” Each student had to pay at least $3,000, she said.
The file-sharing blog at ZeroPaid.com had something to say about that. Ms. Thesing-Ritter’s revelation “confirms our worst fears about the RIAA’s college campus piracy crackdown,” it says. “How many student dropouts are we willing to tolerate … ? Surely this toll on society is much greater than the sharing of a few albums.” —Sara Lipka
Categories: Campus-Piracy, Student-Life
Add Your Comment
Commenting is closed.