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March 14, 2007, 02:57 PM ET
Recording Industry Widens Its Sights
Ohio University was hit hard by the recording industry's new campaign of sending pre-litigation letters to campus song-swapping suspects. The notices went to about 80 students at Ohio, who now will have to decide whether to settle out of court or to wait for the industry to file suit against them.
In the meantime, the university's student newspaper asks a useful question: How do record companies decide which students get served with pre-litigation papers? The Post is, not surprisingly, unable to crack the secrets of MediaSentry, the service that scours peer-to-peer networks for the Internet-protocol numbers of copyright infringers. But Ray Beckerman, a lawyer who has often opposed the recording industry in court, told the newspaper that students who lack technological savvy are more likely to get caught than seasoned pirates are.
One might think record companies would rather go after students who have stolen huge quantities of music. But industry executives say they have changed their strategy to make fair game of anyone who downloads even a few files. "While our lawsuits three years ago initially focused on egregious infringers (those with hundreds of files available), today we do not have any minimum amount of files in order to move forward with a lawsuit," said Steven Marks, general counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America, during an online chat this month with college-newspaper reporters. --Brock Read
Categories: Campus-Piracy, Legal-Troubles
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