The Voice

Issue date: 4/23/07 Section: Science & Technology

Media Credit: Chan Park Amin Ladha said that WCC doesn't have a lot of issues with illegal downloading.

Download music on campus and you could get a 'Go to court card'.

Nationwide, college students who illegally download music files online are being nailed by RIAA lawsuits.

The Recording Industry of Association of America is tracking the Internet Protocol addresses of the students' computers and have their schools identify them as targets for lawsuits.

Recently, the RIAA launched its third wave of copyright infringement lawsuits. Over 400 pre-litigation settlement letters were sent to 22 universities. In the past several months, the trade group sent letters to 23 University of Michigan students, and Central Michigan University had 24 letters sent to its students. So far, Washtenaw Community College students have not been targeted in this campaign.

"Without question, this new enforcement initiative has invigorated a meaningful conversation on college campuses about music theft, its consequences and the numerous ways to enjoy legal music," said Steven Marks, General Counsel and Executive Vice President, RIAA.

These lawsuits targeting end-users are part of RIAA's initiative launched in February aimed at reining in illegal music downloads.

However, WCC hasn't been worrying too much about this latest campaign by the RIAA.

Amin Ladha, Chief Information Officer, said that compared to universities, WCC doesn't have a big problem with students downloading music illegally.

According to Ladha, the school averages 1 to 2 RIAA notices a year concerning students downloading through WCC's computer network.

The Network Services department uses Packeteer to help control illegal downloading on campus. Packeteer is a program that tracks the types of packets, or bits of network traffic, that travel between WCC's network and the Internet. When the program finds packets that are being used by a downloading program, like Kazaa or BitTorrent, it will reduce the bandwidth used by the program drastically, which makes the user eventually give up trying to download a copyrighted file.

When Ladha does get a copyright notice, the violating student is warned to stop downloading copyrighted material or Network Services will step in and terminate the process for the student. Afterwards, Ladha sends a letter to WCC's Internet service provider and the legal department to notify them that the downloading issue has been taken care of.

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