“I think we had six or so from September through February,” Director of Systems, Networking and Technology John Manly said yesterday. “Then we had around nine in March and the beginning of April. But then [since] last Monday, we have started getting five or six per day, every day.” Added Manly, “So far 41 notices have come since last Monday, and I’m expecting several more this afternoon.”
In response to such notifications, the College follows what Manly describes as a largely internal process. “The RIAA provides us with an IP address and a timestamp. We track the IP to find out whose computer it is, send that student a notice that includes what the RIAA sent us, and disconnect their computer from the network,” he said. “We do not inform the RIAA of who the student is.”
Manly sends identified students a message detailing the alleged violation. Such a message reads, “Because the complainant asserts that these files contain copyrighted material that is owned by its member companies, it asks that under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) the College require the network user in question (you) to remove or disable access to the alleged infringing material … In accordance with the DMCA, the College is disabling your computer’s access to most of the Campus Network and the Internet. By copy of this letter, I am informing Ben Lieber, Dean of Students, and Rick Griffiths, Associate Dean of the Faculty (and DMCA compliance officer for Amherst College) of this action.” Repeated complaints, Manly added, can result in further action if the College sees it fit.
“When the student responds that they have removed the infringing content or more often the file-sharing program itself—usually LimeWire—we reactivate their network access,” he said. “The students are also required to meet with Dean Lieber. Students can dispute the notice, claiming either ‘You got the wrong person’ or ‘I didn’t offer those files for download,’ in which case we would check our network logs in more detail, or ‘Yes, I offered those files, but they weren’t infringing’ in which case we would pass that back to the RIAA.”
The College does not block peer-to-peer applications like LimeWire outright, but does limit the bandwidth available to them. While Manly described the College’s network routing policies as content-neutral, he did note that traffic identified by the College as peer-to-peer file-sharing is often “throttled” to keep it from slowing down the network.
Manly noted that the recent increase in infringement notifications is not limited to Amherst. “Other schools are reporting similar or even greater increases,” he said. As the College’s response is done manually, the increased number of notices has created extra work for Manly and has led to a backlog in processing the complaints. “Since most of the above is a manual process—figuring out what computer had that IP, looking up who registered it, sending the e-mail, disconnecting the computer—we’ve fallen behind in processing these notices. We are working on automating the process. So far, of the 41 that have come in since April 21, we have only processed 18 [as of Tuesday].”
In addition to infringement notices, the RIAA also sends institutions “pre-litigation notices.” “These are notices that the RIAA intends to sue the student and offers the student a chance to settle,” explained Manly. “If the recipient refuses to settle, the RIAA may file a “John Doe” lawsuit against them (since they don’t yet know who the student is), and then issue a legal subpoena to the College to obtain the name. This can be very serious as statutory damages for willful infringement can be very high.”
He added, “So far we have seen none of these pre-litigation notices at Amherst. But other schools in the area have received several, so it may only be a matter of time. To date, only one Amherst student has been sued by the RIAA, and that was two or three years ago. But no one knows what may happen now—this increase in infringement notices may foreshadow a flurry of these expensive pre-litigation notices.”