The Recording Industry Institute of America sent 12 Brandeis students letters Dec. 8 charging them with illegal downloading and copyright infringement and offering them an option to pay a settlement fee before formal lawsuits are filed against them. This is the 11th wave of letters sent to University students since the initiative began.The Digital Millennium Copyright Act states that universities are not responsible for copyright infringements made by students and designates DMCA agents at universities to deal with complaints made by the RIAA.

Last spring, 15 Brandeis students received these prelitigation settlement letters from the RIAA. "We believe that 13 of the 15 students who received pre-litigation settlement letters settled. These students paid about $3000 each. The other two we don't know about," said Brandeis' DMCA Agent Elliot Kendall. However, Kendall said that "if they had gone to court we wouldn't have known about it," because both students and the RIAA want to keep the matter secret.

Since the RIAA only designates students by their Internet Provider numbers, it sends prelitigation settlement letters to Kendall, who then shares the letters with Chief Information Security Officer Dennis Devlin. They then match the IP address with the student and send the letters and students' names to the legal department, which then sends out letters to students.

"We don't reveal the identities of the individuals to the RIAA, we just forward it to the individuals," said Devlin.

According to Kendall, settlements tend to be $3,000 to $7,000. Each prelitigation settlement letter contains a list of songs or music illegally downloaded by the student and provides a link to the RIAA Web site, where the student can view and pay their settlement.

The letters sent to Brandeis were part of "a new wave of 396 prelitigation settlement letters to 22 universities nationwide as part of the ongoing campaign against online music theft," according to a Dec. 6 RIAA press release. The release also said that "The letters reflect evidence of significant abuse of campus computer networks for the purpose of copyright infringement."

This week, the RIAA sent out an additional wave of 407 prelitigation settlement letters to 18 universities, which do not appear to include Brandeis, according to a Dec. 10 RIAA press release.

A great number of letters are necessary to deter copyright infringement as "illegal file-trafficking remains a significant and disproportionate problem on college campuses," wrote RIAA President Cary Sherman and CEO Mitch Bainwol in an op-ed in InsideHigherEd.

"Lawsuits are by no means our desired course of action," Sherman and Bainwol wrote. "But when the problem continues to persist, year after year, we are left with no choice.

"I think it is extremely unfortunate that students are being sued by the recording industry," Director of Student Development and Conduct Erika Lamarre wrote in an e-mail to the Justice. However, it drives the University to focus more on illegal downloading and bandwidth abuse by students, she wrote.

"The Dean's office, my office, and Library and Technology Services have been working together to strategize the most effective ways of addressing copyright violations so that we may educate students and hopefully prevent RIAA action," Lamarre said. Devlin also said that LTS is working to educate students about operating safely on the Internet, including such programs as sessions on Digital Self-Defense, offered every semester.

The RIAA can send students either Cease and Desist letters, which function as warning letters, or prelitigation settlement letters.

According to Lamarre, a student who is found to be exceeding the bandwidth limit more than three times or illegally downloading is referred by LTS to Lamarre, who determines an appropriate response, which can include temporarily losing network access.

RIAA selection of students "doesn't seem to be proportional to the number of files that somebody downloads," Devlin said. "If you download one file, you could be susceptible to this. If you want to be sure not to have a problem like this, you have to be sure not to share files.