College Students Settle Suits Filed by Recording Industry

By NICK WINGFIELD
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Four university students sued by major recording companies for operating campus-wide programs that let users download music and other files have reached settlements under which they will each pay between $12,000 and $17,500 to the recording industry.

Under the terms of the separate settlements, the students, without admitting guilt in any of the recording industry's allegations, agreed to disable Web sites that allowed users at their respective schools to find songs and other files located on computers throughout their campus networks. The students, who were sued in federal courts in Michigan, New Jersey and New York last month, also agreed not to knowingly violate copyrights on sound recordings by using the Internet to distribute music.

Daniel Peng at Princeton University in New Jersey and Joseph Nievelt at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Mich., agreed to pay $15,000 to the recording companies, while Jesse Jordan and Aaron Sherman from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., agreed to pay $12,000 and $17,500 respectively. The students will make the payments on installment plans over the next several years.

The settlements resolve the first phase of what could be a risky legal gambit by the major record labels, including AOL Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Music, Sony Corp.'s Sony Music Entertainment, Vivendi Universal SA's Universal Music Group and Bertelsmann AG's BMG, to combat online music piracy, a phenomenon the labels blame for declining music sales. Recording industry executives said the lawsuits have resulted in at least 18 campus-wide file sharing networks being taken down, adding that they may ask for stiffer settlement terms in future legal actions.

"The message is clearly getting through that distributing copyrighted works without permission is illegal, can have consequences, and that we will move quickly and aggressively to enforce our rights," said Mathew Oppenheim, senior vice president of business and legal affairs at the Recording Industry Association of America.

But in suing individuals, particularly university students, analysts and attorneys believe the recording industry may risk alienating a wider swath of music fans.

"It's very unfortunate that the recording industry, in trying to protect their profits, has used the legal system to intimidate students who are often their best customers," said Howard Ende, an attorney at Drinker Biddle who represented Princeton's Mr. Peng.

While the recording industry alleged that the students were operating campus file-sharing networks modeled on Napster, representatives of the students said they did little more than run search engines akin to Google that let users find any kind of digital file, including songs. "He has never stolen anything," said Andy Jordan, the father of defendant Jesse Jordan.

Mr. Jordan added that his son's $12,000 settlement "happens to be the same amount of money that is the total of his bank account. That is money he has saved up over the course of working three years ... to save money for college." Messrs. Nievelt and Sherman didn't return calls for comment.

Suing individuals for sharing music, movies and other copyrighted material may become a more common legal tactic by the recording companies. Last week, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled that two providers of file-sharing programs, StreamCast Networks Inc. and Groskter Ltd., aren't violating copyright laws with their software. The ruling, if it survives an expected appeal by movie studios and recording companies, could force media companies to concentrate their legal efforts on individual users, legal experts predict.

URL for the story: http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB105182439529211800,00.html

Wow from 98+ billion to $59,000 quite a difference about the price of a new Mercedes...I wonder how much of that money will make it Soundexchange for the artists?

Well, I guess this is better than expensive lawyer fees and the inevitability of paying the ungodly large sum of money that they were charged with. Though, these kids never did anything wrong with the program that they wrote, and last I checked, it wasn't illegal to record your media onto your computer.

Also, since musicunited.org has such a problem with filesharing, why don't they teach people how to note share files on a network?

how to not share files, even.

If the RIAA wasn't hated enough they leach money out of poor college student's wallets and for what? File sharing is here to stay.

For those of you who are familiar Peng was one of the four Studenst sued for 98 Billion Dollars recently by the RIAA.

This reminds me of the movie Tottal Recall. The part at the end where they find this ancient marshan mashine that produces breatable air. The corperation on mars that previously created breathable air, and made people pay for it tryed everything they could to stop it, even killing people, all to protect profits made on somthing that should be free.

What happened to the times when music was free? Or atleast reasonably priced. Music is suposed to be the exspression of the soul, not the method through whitch people get richer.

Read the article on www.yahoo.com
They had to pay around 15000 dollars.
Thats terrible, but all the sales and truth that is now spreading because of the suit will actually be a lot more money lost than 15,000 dollars

Meaning the RIAA will actually loose much more than 15,000 dollars in all of this.

Someone should set up a Paypal account for them. I'd pitch in a few $.

The RIAA are cashthirsty leaches trying to suck more money out of college students for doing nothing wrong. All they did was build filesharing networks. So what? Morpheus and Grokster were just ruled legal by the courts. The RIAA is an evil organization driven by one thing: greed! That's what the labels are after: more money! So they can build bigger empires, and in league with the MPAA, rule the broadcast entertainment industry.

I personally like the idea of setting up an account for donations for those students.
I could sacrifice at least ten bucks for this cause, and I am sure a few thousand other p2p users might as well. (Of course I need to be sure that the money goes to them, not to some scam monkey.)

If this happens again, say one person has to settle for $20,000 and then gets compensated by 2,000 random people, the RIAA can sue until the sun explodes. I would gladly pay 10$ a year into some sort of "RIAA Victims Compensation Fund".

...All this as a temporary measure of course. In the long run, all RIAA affiliates need to be cut in pieces and burnt, just like their families and close friends.

Wouldn't that be the biggest kick in the rear for the RIAA. People will donate money to individuals they sue to help pay for a lawsuit, but still won't buy their CD's....I love it...tell me where to sign up.

a compensation fund is a terrific idea. I might know someone who could look into the legal aspects of such a fund. That would be a great way for p2p users to support one another. It would make consumers unafraid. If the RIAA sued them, p2p users would come to the rescue and keep the user alive and downloading. The RIAA would lose its best weapon: the lawsuit. It's their ace of spades.

ex22,PhantomGhost,Spica,gr8bluesgtr,
I agree 1000% Lets do it!

I would suggest a peition in the form of an agreement/commitment. Something along the lines of.

Due to the current anti-consumer, anti-musician environment being generated by the RIAA and recording industry we, the undersigned,(like the wordplay?) have agreed to offer 0$ to the major labels for the next six months. Put simply we will only purchase independent recordings that are label free in which the MAJORITY of the proceeds go to the artist.
Why not. E

The idea of a properly executed fund for these guys is a great idea. I'd be glad to donate a couple bucks myself. I'll also be glad to let the RIAA know that as long as they exist, I won't be buying any new CDs. I'll find all my stuff used so they get nothing.

I've got a tenspot at least for this. Let's come up with at least half their fines for them. The Association might have millions, but we have millions of people. Thumbtack, please post a news article if/when an official donation site becomes available for these guys.

MusicUnited? How about P2PUnited?

Goddamit!!!!

Wtf is this????
Are all you people asleep, they dont want you to listen, Just dont!!!

If i get one of those warning from the fucks, Fuck Metallica, fuck ozzy and a fuck you very much Madonna(if ya need any help call me)... metallica shows NO MORE!!! they are dead! madonna is a retarded bitch with noo brains, iron maiden pissed me off this week, they forgot who they were and who they are now! we made those SOB's they are worth shit without us!

Not that I agree with with hacking, but because the RIAA has no problems with damaging these kids lives for building a search engine, all for the purpose of intimidating others...I think with that PayPal account everyone's talking about, if there was a way for that account to somehow appear on RIAA.com, that would be awesome.

Ps: shouldnt users get together and mass prosecute riia for invasion of privacy, hacking, illegal monitoring, trespassing and harassment? oh shit i forgott spamming...

I agree with Svensta, we college kids have no money, heck, none of us have any money!

I'll be looking for that paypal site, I have a few bucks that I would gladly kick in.

Theres a lot of competition for peoples charity. A "RIAA victim" compensation plan may work, but all it could do is help pay the huge fines, not completly pay them. Theres still the legal problem of potentially profiting from the fine too.

Paypal can be set up to put a cap on monies received however. They can set the total to the total combined fines, and once that limit is hit, it can disable the ssl donation form automatically. That's just the small issue at hand though....

SOB's. I wouldn't pay em sqwat if that were me. That's just so sad that they feel the need to go after kids like this.

heh, if it was me, id high tail out of the United Corperations of America and say fuck the RIAA, they wont ever get any fines from me. Considering a search engine for samba shares isnt illegal.

I also get sick of seeing people read the media and say they got what they deserve and shit, the media states like "designed for people to search for mp3 files, mini napsters, etc". Its just a bunch of bullshit they are feeding to the mainstream people, without a fact to show. News like that should be aganst the law.

Samba share indexing search spiders, since when was google illegal anyways?

Its so simple to fix the problem. Quit buying cd's.

Heh The United RIAA Victims Fund, or RIAA Victims Voice. I like it I don't have a lot of cash, but I'd be more than willing to thumb some green their way so they don't have to drop out of school. Jesse Jordan is probably wishing he were dead right now. Have you ever had something you valued that you worked really hard to get say like a car. Then one day you're in a wreck and the car is totaled? I think that's kind of how Jesse Might feel right now. Not to mention his future now involves nothing more than flipping burgers or packing boxes bcause he has no more money to go to school. Way to go RIAA how do you think this will affect your PR image? Do you think it will cause your sales to drop more?

RIAA: No only oline piracy is causing sales to drop. The economy and the fact that people think that we are money grubbing, swine have nothing to do with it.

Technicly google is illegal. That google cache doesn't ask permission before copying. There have been some minor legal incidents where someone demands google either stops indexing something or removes it from the cache. Google hasn't been sued because whenever it recieves a complaint it just obays. The removed content usually reappears after a while

I go to school at RPI with Jesse and Aaron and because of this whole debaucle all campus search engines have been shut down. And the school is shutting down all computers that allow a user to search the network. Its horrible because I used those search engines to get homework files and other things. The RIAA needs to be stopped.

It's clear to me by this that the RIAA is using underhanded tactics to be just as bad as any p2p user while at the same time playing to the media that they are the good guys against a world of "evil pirate hackers".

The RIAA can NOT justify its actions against the children it filed suit against. I am a college student myself, right now $15000 is the difference between whether or not I will be able to finish school. These kids' lives are ruined now, unless they have rich relatives, or a sympathetic informed public who will help their case financially, they'll be stuck in dead end jobs for the rest of their lives, until maybe they have the money to go back to school later in life if they even have that opportunity from the demands of the work force. Before this, you really couldn't convince me that the RIAA was that bad, they were protecting their business. Having some lame mp3's of Madonna trying to guilt you into not downloading is not that bad in the long run, this however, infuriates me to no end. I will never think of the RIAA as anything more than a faceless corporate mob who will stop at nothing, even detering the education of others, to maintain their profits.

And who can say anything better about the music industry? You have a bunch of brats, whining because they're losing out on that EXTRA million a year that they can't spend on drugs or any of a number of things I don't even want to think of. Most of us work day in and day out and are lucky if we even have a million dollars in our bank accounts at any one particular point in our lives. I have lost all respect for the music industry, as most of you probably have too.

This is not me saying that I condone piracy, it's straight up what it is, stealing. Almost every though who has owned a computer since the early 90's has had at least one non-freeware/opensource program on their computer that they didn't pay for. And personally, I will not buy software or music unless I've had a chance to see how it works or how it sounds. I've been burned too many times by crappy one hit wonder bands to want to shell out almost $20 for a cd that only has one or two good songs. And I don't if everyone here agress with me, but I don't think that ruining someone's education justifies protecting a profit margin and several artists' smack habits.

Of course they are ruined, thats the whole idea. Scare all the other students. As for the media manipulation, they *are* the media. With the crossownership mess of course the media will be on their side.

The lives of all professional musicians and their agents combined are worth less than the life of one MIT student.