Antipiracy Campaign Exasperates Colleges

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting article about Colleges and Universities who have “bent over backward to help the Recording Industry Association of America curb illegal file sharing on his campus” before by passing on “prelitigation settlement letters” and gave over other information in the past. These colleges have found that the RIAA is just asking for more and more information that is overburdening already stretched thin staff. Now that they have realized the amount of effort and staff time they have been spending on this, and have concerns that doing some of these things may actually violate Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), they are finding that past compliance is causing them problems. It is hard to convince a judge that responding to these requests now are an “undo burden” if you have followed through in the past. I guess what surprises me a little about this is how the Universities in the article didn’t consider this early on, before responding to the first request. It is not really surprising that your past actions will be held against you in these types of cases. Once you start bowing down to the RIAA, or any other organization doing this witch hunts, it is hard to break away. Maybe these colleges should have been a little bit more concerned about violating FERPA and having the wrong students accused in the first place. I guess that is the lesson here. If you are ever put in to the situation these colleges were put into first, you need to make sure you think through all of the consequences of how you respond the first time as once you make a decision to comply, it will be very hard to undo that choice.