With blazing fast speeds, college campuses are often used by students to download all the music they’d like. For the past few years the RIAA has been lurking around college campus intranets and using college IT and Administrators to choose their next unsuspecting pool of college victims. It seems that may be about to change and college students nationwide may now be able to breathe a little easier as their universities fight back.
We’re Not Necessarily On Your Side
Due to the transparency of college networks, students are an easy target for the RIAA’s resistant efforts. However, don’t get it twisted. Colleges are not about to start defending the students that actually violate copyright laws. For not only are these students violating the laws of the music industry, but also those of the college. With that being said, colleges are fighting back because they feel that the resources and time spent on chasing these students is cutting into better things that faculty members could be doing.
The Costs and Efforts of the Hunt
So what exactly does it cost colleges to hunt down these students? With the increasing number of subpoenas and “cease-and-desist” letters coming from the RIAA, it’s become a full-time job for college administration to keep up with students across their network, especially if the campus is huge. This has resulted in some colleges having to hire more full-time employees to monitor the networks and make sure the correct correspondents are actually violating the law and receive their notices. Talk about a time-consuming job! Not only that, colleges have also had to install more software to help track and monitor illegal network activities, which results in yet another software that IT employees have to get a handle on.
Just Not Worth All the Effort
In the end, it’s understandable for some colleges to simply stop helping out the RIAA. Their efforts are costing them a ton of money and time. Instead, colleges are opting to focus their efforts towards their school’s mission statements and to the academic well-being of their students. Colleges could spend more time better educating their students on the most current software, upgrading their own systems to reflect these teachings, and overall helping their students in a variety of other ways. We’re sure students will be happy to hear this, but we’d like to warn college students once again that campus efforts to stop piracy will not stop completely.
