No Harvard students were defendants in the MPAA’s April lawsuits, but Bernards said the litigation was meant to send a message to anyone illegally sharing movies online.
“A lot of people who are stealing movies over the Internet think that they’re anonymous, and the more we point out that they’re not, the less likely they are to do it,” she said in April.
LAWSUITS: ROUND ‘2’
In late May, the RIAA announced a second set of lawsuits against college students allegedly using Internet2 to pirate music online. Of the 33 schools whose students were targeted in this round of litigation, 20 had not been included in the first set of suits.
A press release issued at the time said “the RIAA has significantly expanded the scope of its response to this egregious form of music theft popular on college campuses.”
Jonathan L. Zittrain, the Berkman assistant professor of entrepreneurial legal studies at Harvard Law School (HLS) and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, writes in an e-mail that copyright infringement lawsuits for online file sharing have “become genuinely routine” this year.
But “in some ways the year was notable...for the questions that remain unanswered,” he writes, adding that no file sharing lawsuit has yet gone to court because each case has ended in a settlement and that “publishers have refrained from outright suing universities or commercial internet service providers for ‘contributory’ copyright infringement arising from the activities taking place on their networks.”
John G. Palfrey ’94, executive director of the Berkman Center and a lecturer at HLS, writes in an e-mail that this year’s lawsuits against file sharers have shown that copyright holders are serious about protecting their material.
“Some observers thought that the RIAA would just make its statement with a few high-profile lawsuits against students and then back off,” he writes. “That has not been the case.”
“The copyright holders have made it plain this year that they intend to keep the heat on students and others they believe to be infringers, with the number of suits filed now headed into the tens of thousands,” he says. “The copyright holders also made clear that just switching to a new network, like [Internet2], isn’t going to get you off the hook.”
And college students seem to be getting the message.
“The RIAA and MPAA have succeeded in one sense: they’ve raised awareness among those who might be inclined to infringe that they stand a real risk of getting sued,” Palfrey writes. “The Internet is not an anonymous place.”
—Staff writer Matthew S. Lebowitz can be reached at mslebow@fas.harvard.edu.