RIAA

This has been all over the news, but the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has sued four students at three separate universities for offering download services that contain hundreds of thousands of music files. Wired writes: “The RIAA charges that one network operator distributed 27,000 music files, while the other three students ran networks offering 500,000 music files, 650,000 files and over 1 million files.” The RIAA is seeking $150,000 (the limit allowable by law) for each individual copyrighted song. Let’s see… $150,000 multiplied by 1,000,000… Obviously this is more about shutting these things down and sending a message than recouping money from college students.

There was a freshman here at the University of Iowa who was doing the same thing — allowing people within the university network to download music files. Given the RIAA lawsuit, he’s probably lucky he got shut down back in February. The story made the front page news and is still up on the Daily Iowan site [here]. (Free registration required.) It doesn’t mention how many files were being offered.