Lawyers, start your engines.
The face of digital music technology, which has been developing since the start of Napster in May 1999, is now facing another obstacle course: four new lawsuits. The defendants? Four students at three different universities across the nation.
The lawsuits, filed by the Recording Industry Association of America, are another step in the increasing pressure recently placed on universities to stop campus file sharing.
RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a prepared statement that the systems being used at the universities — called Phynd, Flatlan or Direct Connect — work along the same lines as Napster.
“The court ruled that Napster was illegal and shut it down,” he said. “These systems are just as illegal and operate in just the same manner.” In February 2001, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Napster knew its users were violating copyright law, and Napster agreed to remove a list of songs from its server.
However, some say that RIAA is missing the key point of these three new services. Fred Von Lohmann, an attorney with Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is a digital civil liberties group that has defended various file sharing companies against the RIAA, said that all Phynd, Flatlan and Direct Connect seemed to do was index files available on a network that already existed.
“It doesn’t seem like there’s anything wrong with building a tool to do that,” he said. “And it doesn’t seem like there’s anything wrong with running that tool.”
The technology used by the three servers varies, with Direct Connect resembling Napster the most by allowing users to connect to a central server and download files from each other. In contrast, Flatlan lets the user set up a search engine that searches computers that are connected to a campus network and have Windows file-sharing turned on. The main difference between Flatlan and Napster is Flatlan searches a network that already exists. Phynd is a generic search engine that allows users to configure it to search everything from Web sites to local files that are found on a college network.
RIAA countered the argument that the three servers are different from Napster in a press release, however, stating that the networks work similarly by centrally indexing and processing search requests for copyrighted works, adding that network operators “can’t help but be aware of the copyright infringement they facilitate.”
RIAA representatives could not be reached at press time.
In the lawsuit filed against Flatlan creator Aaron Sherman, a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, RIAA claimed Sherman created a system that is designed to enable and facilitate widespread and unauthorized copying and distribution of sound recordings over the campus’s local area network.
A local area network, also called LAN, is a computer network dispersed over a limited, defined geographical area, such as a university campus, through which one computer can interact with all other computers within the network.
The lawsuit accused Sherman of “hijacking an academic computer network and installing on it a marketplace for copyright piracy that is used by others to copy and distribute music illegally.” The RIAA, the plaintiff in the case, is asking that the court issue a permanent injunction to stop Sherman from directly or indirectly infringing on copyright, along with maximum statutory damages in the amount of $150,000 for each copyright work infringed, and payment of RIAA’s attorney’s fees.
“This is a particularly flagrant way to illegally distribute millions of copyrighted works over the Internet,” Sherman said in a statement. “The lawsuits we’ve filed represent an appropriate step, given the seriousness of the offense.”
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