When the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a trade group representing U.S. record companies, announced this summer that it would start suing individuals who use “peer-to-peer” file-sharing programs such as Kazaa and Limewire to share copyrighted music files, Macalester’s Computer and Information Technology office knew Macalester students could end up being targeted.

Illegal trading of copyrighted music files on college campuses, Macalester’s included, has been growing since the late nineties and has become a hobby of many college students. Macalester students alone could owe billions of dollars in fines by the exact letter of the copyright law.

And the RIAA does not appear to be letting anyone it catches off easy.

Last week, the mother of a 12-year-old settled out of court for $2000 after the RIAA caught her daughter sharing over 1,000 songs using the Kazaa file-sharing application. Had the RIAA sought the full fine, which it has yet to do, the mother would have to pay over $150 million.

The 12 year-old says she was unaware that her activities were illegal, as did a 71-year-old grandfather who is being sued after the RIAA caught his grandsons sharing music on his computer.

When compared to adolescent girls and grandparents, otherwise law-abiding Macalester student music-traders seem like fairly reasonable targets for the RIAA’s subpoenas. The threat of these lawsuits is creating a growing concern among many Macalester students, encouraging some to stop downloading music and others to swipe all illegal music files from their computers.

Such drastic actions to avoid the RIAA’s investigations may not be necessary. Currently, the RIAA is only seeking out music swappers that share more than 1,000 copyrighted music files. Also, the RIAA can only identify files that are shared across file-sharing networks, not downloaded on the networks. This means that the RIAA’s investigative team cannot yet catch users of file-sharing networks that download copyrighted music files but do not share them.

Macalester’s file-sharers will be further comforted to know that Macalester does not actively seek out illegal activity on its network.

“Macalester does not examine the information content that is being transmitted (i.e. the music itself) but does monitor the type of information (i.e. that it is an MP3 file) in order for [Macalester] to give priority to academic uses of [Macalester’s] network.” Associate Director of CIT David Sisk said that his office will block the ports of those users using up a severely disproportionate percentage of the schools’ bandwidth, though they will not do anything simply because a student may be sharing copyrighted media.

However, in accordance with the current interpretation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), the federal legislation cited by the RIAA to sue individual users, CIT will take action if contacted by the RIAA, which has already occurred a number of times since the RIAA began sending out subpoenas. When this occurs, CIT finds the port through which the RIAA has observed the apparent violation, and turns that port off, disabling the users’ connection. The user is then asked to remove the media from their computer, and to turn off their file-sharing software.

CIT then reports back to the RIAA to inform them that their requests have been fulfilled. However, if the user’s service is turned back on and they have still not adhered to both the RIAA’s and Macalester’s policies, they are open to further legal action being taken against them.

However, Sisk explains that “right now [CIT is] very reactive,” and that in order for a Macalester student who is sharing files to get involved at all with the RIAA, the RIAA “has to bring a valid subpoena.”

As such, for the moment it appears that if students have a basic understanding of their own responsibilities as users of the Macalester network, legal action can certainly be avoided or dealt with without repercussions in its early stages.

File-sharing of copyrighted music gained national awareness in 1999 when Shawn Fanning’s Napster, a program devised to allow Fanning and his friends to share files across their college network, became a nationally recognized application, and the focus of significant media attention. Napster and similar programs such as Kazaa, Gnutella, Morpheus and LimeWire all have the same basic premise: to create a forum through which computer users can search other users’ computers to access media files.

Problems arose when the RIAA complained that their copyrighted product was being exchanged among users of such file-sharing programs, without any fees being paid to the owners of those copyrights.

Supporters of these peer-to-peer programs were initially successful in countering the RIAA’s claims by explaining that the operators of the networks did not actually possess the copyrighted material at any time; they simply provided a medium of exchange for users. The RIAA has been moving to get around this argument by going after individual users, such as the aforementioned 12-year-old, as well as college students around the country.

Though the RIAA has only filed 261 lawsuits to date, the association has threatened to file many more, and thousands of subpoenas have already been issued. The future of these lawsuits depends on a ruling which will decide whether the RIAA can continue to issue subpoenas without the consent of a judge and continue to demand ISPs to release the real names of users caught sharing copyrighted works.

Though a January ruling agreed with the RIAA, the DC Court of Appeals has been reviewing the decision as requested by Verizon, an ISP. Verizon claims that because the copyrighted material is never actually on a Verizon server and is merely exchanged through the network to various users’ hard drives, Verizon is not obliged to give the RIAA the names of users engaging in file-sharing.

Whichever way the Verizon case falls, the legislation and interpretations of the ruling will continue to change, forcing those who share files through peer-to-peer networks to remain informed of their responsibilities if they choose to continue partaking in such activities. Both the RIAA and ISP’s like Verizon have repeatedly said that they will gladly continue to appeal the case all the way to the Supreme Court.