The RIAA has long emphasized the importance of universities’ cooperation in helping them quash file-sharing, which often flourishes on college campuses. But as the size of the RIAA’s legal apparatus grows, so too does the number of DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown requests received by college bureaucrats. The result has been a strain in the cooperation between the two groups, with universities increasingly unwilling to compromise students’ privacy as doubts rise over the legitimacy of many RIAA suits. This development marks a substantial departure from the previously amicable collaboration between the recording industry and institutions of higher learning in the bringing down of file-sharers.

The momentum against the RIAA has been mounting for a while on college campuses, with criticism coming from student publications and professors alike. Numerous university professors, most notably Azer Bestavros (former chair of Computer Science at Boston University), have testified in court that the digital evidence used by the RIAA to prove infringement is highly inaccurate. Their argument surrounded the use of MAC addresses (a number that identifies a machine to the network) to pinpoint culpable users, but MAC addresses can easily be spoofed to lead to the wrong machine.

Independent of these technical concerns, however, is the overwhelming amount of paperwork that college IT departments have had to deal with since the beginning of the RIAA’s predatory legal campaign. Colleges are, to put it simply, fed up with the RIAA and no longer interested in expending resources on aiding the prosecution of its students. This change in tone in the relationship between colleges and the RIAA is refreshing—while we don’t condone illegal filesharing, it is absurd that students’ own tuition dollars were being spent on aiding the RIAA unleash its legal dogs on them more effectively.

Tags: Learning Technologies, Online Education