In the ongoing battle between the record industry and peer-to-peer file sharing of music, universities are stuck in the middle. A noted intellectual property lawyer suggests that they should take sides and resist "copyright bullies."

The record industry's approach is "wrong for universities, wrong for education and wrong for society," declared Wendy Seltzer, a fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and a visiting professor at Northeastern University School of Law, speaking in Robert Purcell Auditorium, Sept. 27, in one of two talks sponsored by the Cornell Computer Policy and Law Program.

Record companies have filed some 20,000 lawsuits against individuals -- often university students but also citizens ranging from grandmothers to 8-year-olds -- seeking damages for copyright infringement for sharing music files.

Lately the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been sending "settlement letters," which allege copyright infringement and invite the recipient to settle out of court, typically for around $4,000, to avoid a lawsuit.

While no one disagrees that most file sharers are breaking the law, "There are lots of problems with what the RIAA is doing," Seltzer said, including legal problems. The letters are sent to the university and refer to an IP address that has been identified as a source of illegal downloading. It is left to the university to forward the letter to the owner of the computer with that IP address. (Cornell forwards the letters, believing that students involved have a right to be notified of a possible threat.) Properly, the copyright owner ought first to subpoena the university to provide the name of the alleged infringer.

"We should hold these complainants to the law as written, not the law as they would like it to be," Seltzer said. She suggested that universities refuse to forward the letters, as at least 100 colleges and universities so far have done. She also said that there might be ways to reject subpoenas, perhaps because complying represents an "undue burden."

Part of that burden, she said, is that the activity conflicts with the university's mission to promote free expression and academic freedom. "The costs to the university are higher than those to a commercial Internet service provider," she explained, "because of the pall it casts over the network."

In a second talk later that day, Seltzer widened her criticism of the content providers, which include movie and television companies as well as the music industry, and argued that copyright law and business models need to be updated to match current technology.

Noting that the industry has created a system that frustrates users with "a tangle of rights," she urged students to take political action. "We need to tell Congress that this is a real problem," she said, adding that maybe the industry will move voluntarily to a better system, and "maybe it's going to rain pink marshmallows."

Seltzer suggested wider use of the Creative Commons license, which turns the "all rights reserved" concept of copyright into "some rights reserved," as well as subscription services that would provide content free of digital rights management restrictions in return for a monthly fee.

"I think we can find business models that work for the consumers and for the artists, but it's not just going to come to us," she said.