In the past several months the RIAA has sent out 405 letters to college students demanding $750 for each song downloaded or a settlement fee of $3,000. This has come following the 2006 attacks against 18,000 people, including a 7-year-old girl, 83-year-old dead grandmother and people who don't even have computers. Each of these new lawsuits were initiated by the RIAA tracking college computer networks of students who have accidentally forgotten to turn off the upload feature on their files. Realistically, these are not the avid users who download a lot of music, since most of the avid users know how to protect themselves by turning off file-sharing. The RIAA is only going after the sharing of music, not the downloading. But the real question is not about upload versus download. The real question is who is responsible for allowing file upload and download on college campuses.
Every large organization and many well-off high schools have been known to use web guardians or IP address blockers. Trying not to get too technical, an IP address is an address or identifier for a computer. Just like 189 W. Washington is a specific location of a house in our world, an IP address number like 132.123.23.22 is a location in the online world of a computer. With an IP address blocker, schools and organizations can block peer-to-peer computer locations. For example, most large companies block the address 216.168.224.70, which is Kazaa, one of the largest music peer-to-peer sharing software.
So what should be done? If colleges give out names of each computer on their network or complain about the attacks from the RIAA, shouldn't these colleges just put up an IP address blocker? It might cost the schools to implement and purchase the software, but in the long run it would be a lot cheaper than the amount of lawsuits against the schools and students.
Some students will argue the fact that IP address blocking is against their constitutional free will, and that they should be able to do whatever they want on a computer and the Internet. What students don't take into consideration is that the internet provider and the government have the right to block any IP address to protect individuals from Web pages featuring child porn and bomb-making instructions. Realistically, the suggestion of blocking IP addresses is a better suggestion than other solutions, like Purdue University who denies internet access to students violating the rule against peer-to-peer file-sharing.
Ryan Hartley is a senior management information systems major.
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Letter to the Editor
