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Student sued by music industry { April 4 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.detnews.com/2003/technology/0304/04/technology-128278.htmhttp://www.detnews.com/2003/technology/0304/04/technology-128278.htm
Friday, April 4, 2003
Michigan Tech student sued by music industry over file sharing
By Gary Gentile / AP Business Writer
LOS ANGELES -- The recording industry is suing students at Michigan Technological and two other universities, saying they ran Napster-like file sharing systems on the schools' high-speed Internet networks.
The lawsuit says Michigan Tech student Joseph Nievelt and three others ran systems offering more than 1 million copies of songs for illegal downloading.
The Recording Industry Association of America, the music industry's trade group, filed the lawsuits Thursday seeking to shut down the networks.
It says the networks are responsible for distributing illegal copies of songs by Avril Lavigne, Whitney Houston, Eminem and others. The suits also seek maximum damages of $150,000 per song.
The association said the networks were being run by Nievelt and students at Princeton University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The group sued in federal courts in Michigan, New Jersey and New York.
A message was left for Nievelt at his dormitory Thursday night seeking comment.
The suits say the students stored thousands of songs on a central server and made them available to students, staff, administrators and others with access to the schools' private networks. The songs could be downloaded using standard Web browsers.
The students allegedly used software with names such as Flatlan and Phynd, which allow the indexing of songs on a central server and respond to requests for individual files.
The record industry group said the offenses were akin to those committed by Napster, which was ordered shut down after the courts found it violated musical copyrights.
"These systems are just as illegal and operate in the same manner," association President Cary Sherman said in a statement.
The universities, which were not named as defendants, said they were investigating the claims. All the schools have policies prohibiting the use of their computer networks for copyright infringement.
The lawsuit irritated the president of Michigan Tech in Houghton, who said he wished the music industry had contacted the school, as he said it had done in the past when copyright infringements were discovered.
"Had you followed the previous methods established in notification of a violation, we would have shut off the student and not allowed the problem to grow to the size and scope that it is today," Curtis Tompkins wrote Thursday in a letter to Sherman. "I am very disappointed that the RIAA decided to take this action in this manner."
The association said the large scale of the alleged offenses required a strong response.
"This is not an instance of an individual student simply offering up some sound recordings on a Web site," said Matthew Oppenheim, senior vice president of business and legal affairs for the group.
In the Michigan Tech case, Oppenheim said, Nievelt ran a network offering more than 650,000 music files for downloading, in addition to 1,866 songs from his own personal collection.
"It would be our hope that universities are aware of what is happening on their networks," Oppenheim said. "The onus shouldn't rest on any given copyright holder to provide a warning to an individual when something of this size and scope is happening."
Princeton spokeswoman Lauren Robinson-Brown said the school is unable to constantly monitor its network but does take swift action when notified of copyright infringement. The school has removed the site, she said.
The entertainment industry recently has become more aggressive in pursuing copyright infringers.
Four entertainment industry groups sent a letter to 2,300 university presidents last year, urging a tough stand on copyright infringement. In January, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that Verizon Communications Inc. must identify an Internet subscriber suspected of illegally offering more than 600 songs from well known artists.
The industry group had sought the user's identity with a subpoena approved under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
In February, the Recording Industry Association of America joined with the Motion Picture Association of America in sending a six-page brochure to Fortune 1000 corporations that suggested corporate policies and offered a sample memo to employees warning against using company computers to download content from the Web.
The brochure also carries a clear threat: Stop workers from stealing copyright materials or be sued.
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