The Chronicle

February 5th, 2008

Duke students receive various letters from RIAA

The entertainment industry, including the Recording Industry Association of America, sends out several kinds of letters and e-mails to students.

Freshman Pat Light said the e-mail that he received from RIAA was forwarded from Duke Office of Information Technology. The file name and the date of the illegal upload were also included in the e-mail.

“OIT basically told me to stop sharing a file in Limewire by uploading it,” Light said. “I haven’t heard from them since.”

A second type of letter, also sent by the RIAA to Duke, demands the student pay upwards of thousands of dollars.

“It was basically saying, if you don’t give us X amount of money for settlement right now, we are going to sue,” junior Dan Blalock said.

Senior Aaron Gilbert said students may also receive a third type of letter, which originates within Duke, when the amount they uploading exceeds five gigabytes per day. William Cannon, senior communications strategist in OIT News and Information, said the limit has nothing to do with the current illegal file-sharing practices. In addition, an anonymous source inside OIT said the office does not know what students are doing on the network.

“We can’t speak to what content is on the network or what students are or aren’t doing,” an anonymous source inside OIT said. “OIT does not monitor content or user’s activities on the network, and there are no plans to change that at this point.”

Like most warnings, however, the letters from RIAA are not received happily by students.
“They are suing old grandmas and frivolous kids,” Blalock said.

As for whether students’ behaviors will ultimately change or not, Light said it is unlikely.

“If they are really afraid of something huge happening, like they will get kicked out of school for this, then they will stop,” he said. “But I think there are other students like me here, who are like, ‘Look, [Peer-to-Peer] file sharing is here to stay, and the Recording Industry Association of America needs to back off.’”
-Hon Lung Chu

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