Taking the battle to campuses and courtrooms

A year ago today, the Recording Industry Association of America launched a new campaign against on-campus file-sharing. There was a mass mailing to college presidents, some public service announcements, and most importantly, 400 prelitigation settlement letters mailed to 13 universities. Ars spoke to RIAA president Cary Sherman as the "campus initiative's" first anniversary approached to get the RIAA's perspective on how it was working out and where it might be headed.

The campaign is similar to that carried out against suspected P2P users. Prelitigation settlement letters are sent out to universities, addressed to the user of a specific IP address. If the school identifies the student to whom the IP address was assigned at the time and passes along the letter, he or she has the opportunity to settle with the RIAA for $3,000 instead of the usual $4,000. If the student doesn't respond or the school fails to pass the letter along, a John Doe lawsuit is filed and the RIAA attempts to learn the identity of the person using the IP address by means of a subpoena.

Here's how the numbers look after a year. The RIAA has sent out 5,404 letters in 13 "waves" to over 160 colleges and universities. Of the 5,003 settlement letters sent prior to the batch of 401 that went out last week, "more than" 2,300 of those have resulted in the targeted students settling with the RIAA. 2,465 students have been hit with lawsuits, and all of those are moving through the legal system at different rates. At $3,000 per settlement, over 2,300 settlements translates into at least $6.9 million.

Positive trends



RIAA president Cary Sherman

The numbers sound impressive, but has the new initiative lived up to the RIAA's expectations and led to the kind of results the group hoped to see? Sherman sees reasons to be encouraged, citing positive responses from many of the schools contacted by the RIAA. "Schools are clearly responding to the problem in a helpful way, both in terms of education and student behavior," said Sherman.

He's also seeing positive trends in overall P2P use that give the group hope that its legal campaign is working. "The data is consistent that there has been a flattening of P2P use even though broadband penetration has been growing," Sherman pointed out. "We think a lot of the reason for that is because of the active steps we have taken to enforce our rights."

Indeed, tracking firm Big Champagne told Ars last year that music file-sharing rates have held steady since the spring of 2006. On a month-by-month basis, 2007 traffic was nearly flat, with variations falling within the margin of error. But Big Champagne CEO Eric Garland had a slightly different take on the data than did Sherman. He believes that the lack of P2P growth owes more to market saturation than legal threats. "It's like e-mail," Garland said. "For a number of years, the population using e-mail was increasing dramatically. Once everyone who wanted e-mail had e-mail, growth flattened out."

Sherman points to the recording industry's experience in Canada to buttress his argument. "You would think that digital sales in Canada would do even better than in the US because broadband penetration is higher," he said. "But there's no enforcement in Canada, and when you look at the digital sales figures it shows that there's more of a pirate market there." According to the RIAA's preliminary figures, legal downloads account for only 10 percent of Canadian music sales versus 22 percent in the US. "The fact that we have piracy a little more under control online here because of the lawsuits is a reason why we have more of a successful digital market in the US than Canada," Sherman argued.

A PR nightmare?

We also asked Sherman about public reaction to the campaign. He took issue with a suggestion that the legal campaign was something akin to a PR nightmare. "Our basic survey data is that the majority of consumers don't have a problem with the lawsuits," he replied. "You would never know that from reading blogs and websites, [but] when you go out to the general public, our favorables/unfavorables haven't changed at all. People are much more concerned about the content of the lyrics than our lawsuits."

It may be the case that the public looks more favorably on the RIAA's campaign than the blogosphere, but it's also significant that the music industry is alone among Big Content in its willingness to take on individual file-sharers in court. In contrast, the Motion Picture Association of America has focused its attention on BitTorrent sites rather than their users, while studios and TV networks appear more inclined towards taking legal action towards big web sites, as Viacom has against YouTube. Studios and networks are definitely wary about taking the same approach as the RIAA and ending up with a PR nightmare; one industry executive recently told Ars that his company was concerned about "looking like the RIAA."

There has been a wide variety of reaction to the campaign, according to Sherman. "We just got an e-mail the other day from some small indie artist that said 'I know some people think [the campaign] is unpopular, but thank you because it's making a difference."

The effect of DMCA takedowns

In addition to sending out prelitigation settlement letters, the RIAA has also been busy sending out DMCA takedown notices to schools when it finds copyrighted material online. That number has increased lately because of an improved ability to find material, says Sherman. "Universities have responded in different ways [when receiving a takedown notice], but they all do something," he said. "It has been very helpful in letting people know that they're not really anonymous and that they're lucky they got a notice and not a lawsuit."

"When we looked at the top 50 schools [in terms of DMCA notices] from the fall semester 2006-07 to the fall semester 2007-08, 29 of the schools have dropped off," Sherman said. Indeed, the RIAA's figures show dramatic changes in the list of schools with the highest number of takedown notices. The number one school in 2006-07, the University of South Carolina, is now in the 166th position. The 914 DMCA takedown notices sent to that school in '06-07 has plummeted to just 45 in '07-08. 12 of the top 20 schools from 2006-07 have dropped completely out of the top 50; others, like the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (which has held steady in the number two position), are proving to be tougher nuts to crack.