Observers can debate whether the recording industry’s new tactic of sending out pre-litigation notices is a helpful gesture to college students or an end run around the legal system. But whatever the case, industry executives have reason to be sanguine about the new strategy — if out-of-court settlements can be taken as a sign of success, that is.
Last month industry lawyers sent 400 of the notices, each identifying a file-sharing suspect by his or her Internet Protocol number, to 13 different colleges. Many of the institutions opted to forward the notes, which offered students the chance to settle — at an unspecified discount — before the industry filed suit. And now the early returns are in: According to the Associated Press, 116 students decided to go ahead and pay up.
That’s a pretty good haul for the recording industry, since it has managed to avoid paying court fees for all those would-be defendants. It’s still not clear, though, how significant the discount promised to early settlers is. A lawyer for Ohio University told the AP the standard out-of-court settlement offer is $3,000, but he added that some students have settled for as much as $5,000. Those figures might seem minuscule next to the potential liabilities cited in the industry’s pre-litigation notices, but they don’t seem like much of a savings to students from the industry’s previous settlement rate, which many analysts had pinned at an average of $4,000. —Brock Read
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