RIAA sends more letters on Music downloading

Los Angeles Daily Journal

By Andrew Harmon

March 21, 2007

LOS ANGELES - In a second round of settlement notices targeted at college students accused of illegally downloading music, the Recording Industry Association of America sent 405 new letters Wednesday to administrators nationwide, including 57 addressed to unnamed students in the University of California system.

The letters are part of a campaign by the association launched in February that offers students the option to settle with record labels before a John Doe copyright infringement suit is filed. Critics have called the program a campaign of scare tactics and extortion aimed at students with limited legal resources.

One of the universities, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has refused to forward the letters, which offers settlements reported to be as much as $3,500 to students accused of downloading music from peer-to-peer file sharing Web sites like Limewire, Kazaa and Aries.

The California schools targeted by the letters are UCLA, UC-Berkeley and UC-Santa Cruz.

Mary MacDonald, a lawyer with the general counsel's office for the University of California system, said the three schools will comply in forwarding the letters to the students.

"We thought it would be in the best interest of the students to provide them as much notice as possible regarding these lawsuits," MacDonald said. "We are making clear in our communication that we have not determined the validity of the allegations, nor are we making any recommendations regarding whether they should participate in the settlement process."

MacDonald added that the universities will not disclose any personally identifying information about their students to the association unless served with a subpoena.

Since the program began, the recording industry has settled claims with 116 individuals, according to organization spokeswoman Jenni Engebretsen.

The organization, which represents record label giants EMI, Warner Music, Sony BMG and Vivendi Universal, will continue to send a similar number of letters each month as it investigates peer-to-peer file swapping, Engebretsen said.

"We have made real progress in addressing the file-sharing problem at large, but we know that such activity at university campuses remains particularly acute," she said. Students have 20 days on receipt of the letter to contact organization officials in order to settle a case through its Web site, p2plawsuits.com.

Thirteen of the universities targeted Wednesday have complied with the request, but the University of Wisconsin-Madison has refused to forward the letters, said Brian Rust, communications manager for the university's division of information technology.

"We don't want to associate with the recording industry in terms of what punishment or settlement they plan to mete out," Rust said.

Engebretsen said the university has not contacted the organization.

"But if the university has chosen to adopt this policy," she said, "it is unfortunate that students would lose the opportunity to settle the claims against them at a discounted sum and to erase this off their public record."

Seyamack Kouretchian, a partner at Coast Law Group in Encinitas who represents a USC student targeted by the organization, said the pre-lawsuit option "is misleading to shell-shocked students" who receive the notices.

"They are far from settlement agreements. The defendant admits liability and promises to pay, but they are not being released from anything and might be signing up for more liability down the road," Kouretchian said.

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