Still Downloading the UW File-Sharing Thing...
Deep breaths, Seattlest. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Again. Good. The University of Washington isn't taking a tire iron to the knees of students over file-sharing, although it seemed that way in the Vice Provost for Student Life's email yesterday. Probably should have run that missive by a few people before hitting the spam button there, Vice Provost. Not that news of the university's compliance with the RIAA's demands wouldn't cause consternation in some circles regardless of pillowy language...
Since yesterday afternoon some more email (or here in the comments) has been sent to UW Tech Support people that says basically the same thing as the original letter, while taking the time to be a little nicer and a little clearer. It explains that the RIAA already sends the university a large amount of complaint notices. Those notices probably look something like, "User with the IP address of xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is downloading music." The university sends a notice to that user to knock it off. User knocks it off. Or doesn't--it's not clear what happens in that case, but anyway the university doesn't report the identity of the user to the RIAA.
The early settlement letters that entered the conversation recently will follow, basically, the same route. The RIAA issues them based on an infringing IP address, UW matches that IP address with a student and sends it to a student who can then pay the $5,000 the letter demands or not, although the student risks the RIAA filing suit against them in that case. The RIAA would have to obtain a subpoena to force the university to divulge the identity of the student who was associated with the infringing IP address, but it's questionable whether they'd be successful in getting that subpoena.
What also still isn't clear, at least to Seattlest, is whether the early settlement letters are replacing the infringement warnings that the RIAA has been sending the university every month ("the many, many DMCA complaint notices we receive every month" according to this email) or whether the complaint notices will still be sent along with some arbitrary number of early settlement letters. Or are all of those "many, many" notices going to turn into many, many $5,000 settlement letters?
Does the University of Washington have any choice in the matter of whether or not to deliver early settlement notices to its students? As noted in the comments of this Metblogs post on the subject, the UW can tell the RIAA to fuck off entirely, they can pass the letters on to students (which they are doing), or they can be really evil and pass the letters on to students while telling the RIAA who they're delivering them to. So it could be worse. It could also be better, though. The University of Wisconsin has decided not to be a party to the early settlement letters.
If you're a UW student and using the UW network to download music, you might want to restrict your activities to the music that this site says isn't released by the RIAA until such time as you can be reasonably certain that you're not going to get hit up for five grand. There are plenty of legal downloads out there. UW is your ISP and ISP's are forced to cooperate with the RIAA. Laws... It would be nice if the university would recognize that, while it's legally the same as AOL or MSN or whatever in this situation, it wouldn't be unreasonable for it to treat you differently than MSN or AOL treats its users. You know, because you or your parents are paying it to educate and house you, specifically, and to provide you with a safe place to be educated, generically, and the whole ISP thing isn't really their main money maker.
