Recording industry threatens to sue students More university students targeted by RIAA in concerted move to crack down on file sharing

Natalie Miles was shocked when she received the letter from the recording industry. She may have to consider bankruptcy now to settle the suit. The UC Santa Cruz student had allegedly shared 599 songs through the popular online service Limewire. {By Brant Ward/San Francisco Chronicle} less Natalie Miles was shocked when she received the letter from the recording industry. She may have to consider bankruptcy now to settle the suit. The UC Santa Cruz student had allegedly shared 599 songs through ... more Photo: Brant Ward Photo: Brant Ward Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Recording industry threatens to sue students 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

Natalie Miles, a legal studies student at UC Santa Cruz, is getting some unwelcome education in her major.

Attorneys representing some of Hollywood's biggest companies say the 20-year-old illegally made 599 songs available for sharing on a popular online service. For that, she was told in a letter from the recording industry, Miles will be sued in federal court unless she can come up with about $3,000 for a settlement.

"It's horrible," said Miles, who insists she did nothing wrong and can't afford to settle. "I just don't think that these people realize that they're ruining people's lives."

The letter was especially astonishing because Miles, who doesn't count herself as much of a music fan, said she never used Limewire, the file-sharing service that the Recording Industry Association of America cited in the letter. But she acknowledged that others might have used her computer in her absence because she wasn't careful about protecting her password.

"I was living in an apartment on campus with five others," Miles said. "I would bring friends over, they would bring friends over - I never locked my door."

Nearly a year after starting a crusade to stop college students from illegally sharing online music, the recording group has sent 5,000 such letters to college students across the country, accusing them of piracy. At the same time, they offer the students a chance to put it all behind them by paying several thousand dollars.

The crackdown is part of a broader, yearslong effort by the association to curb online music sharing, a wildly popular practice that allows consumers to download music for free through online services Limewire, Ares and Gnutella. Called peer-to-peer, or P2P, networks, the services allow users to tap into and download songs from other users' collections. Adhering to copyright laws is left up to the users.

Music companies complain that file sharing, which violates copyright laws, is cutting into their profits, and they point to falling album sales as evidence. U.S. album sales fell 9.5 percent in 2007 from a year earlier, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

But the recording industry's aggressive campaign against music piracy has earned it enmity. Critics say that suing potential customers is unwise and they call on music companies to find a successful business model for the digital era rather than trying to protect a failing one.

Whether the association's legal strategy is working is unclear.

Several years of sharp growth in the use of peer-to-peer networks, which also are used to share television clips and films, has ended, according to BigChampagne, a company that measures the use of the networks. Still, the average number of users on such networks at any one time remained at around 9.3 million globally in 2007, about the same as it was a year earlier, the company found.

"The fact that peer-to-peer traffic is relatively flat, we take that as a positive impact of our effort," said Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the recording association. "But that doesn't mean that the practice isn't intolerably damaging to the industry."

During the early years of its anti-piracy fight, the trade group took a more muted approach with colleges. When its investigations uncovered music file sharing on college Internet networks, the group usually demanded that the material be removed by sending what are known as take down notices.

Then last year, the association stepped up the fight with an initiative to routinely threaten individual students with lawsuits. Students who received the letters were told they could avoid going to court by paying a settlement - usually between $3,000 and $4,000 - that can be paid in a number of ways, including online by credit card and in monthly installments.

Each month, the trade group sends out about 400 such letters to colleges across the nation including UC Berkeley, Stanford University and UC Santa Cruz. Of the 5,000 students who have received the letters, 1,800 have settled, according to the association.

In addition to threatening lawsuits, and making an example of the targets, the recording group is encouraging universities to spread the word about the dangers of file sharing and to provide free, legal music downloading services to students. Lamy said illicit file sharing has dropped significantly at universities that take such steps.

Miles, the UC Santa Cruz student, got the first of her three pre-litigation letters eight months ago while she was at home on spring break. She said that she was shocked to read the contents: that she offered to share hundreds of music files from her computer and had 20 days to contact the recording association or be sued in federal court.

Miles said she immediately told her parents about the letter and contacted an attorney.

As with many students accused of piracy, the recording industry didn't originally know Miles' identity. It instead sent the pre-litigation letter to the university, along with the address of a computer involved in suspected file sharing, and asked the school to forward the warning.

Eventually, the music companies subpoenaed Miles' records from UC Santa Cruz to learn her identity. Her attorney, she said, tried to get the university to fight the court order, but he didn't succeed.

Miles said she is unwilling to settle with the recording group, and in any case, doesn't have enough money to do so. A collections agency working for the association has called her parents to pressure them to pay. Meanwhile, Miles said, she's nervously waiting to be sued while continuing her studies.

If taken to court, Miles said that she might declare bankruptcy. In that way, she may be able to avoid having to pay a court judgment.

"I would much rather go on that course than give the recording industry money for something I didn't do," Miles said.

A Minnesota woman who decided to fight the recording association in court over accusations of illicit file sharing, rather than settle, lost her case in October. Illustrating the high stakes, the federal court ordered her to pay $220,000 to six music companies.

Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, said he's spoken with many students who have been targeted by the recording group and have had to drop out of school and start work to pay their settlements. He said that even if students have a good defense, many settle to avoid hiring an expensive attorney, the headaches and the potential for much bigger damages levied in a trial.

"This is a very unfair fight," von Lohmann said.