Cornell students who illegally download or send music files could soon be getting a warning letter: Pay up, or else.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has adopted a new tactic in its ongoing battle against illegal music file sharing. It is sending "settlement letters." A warning about the new approach was contained in an e-mail sent last Friday (March 9) to all students by Tracy Mitrano, director of information technology policy in the Office of the Vice President for Information Technologies. A copy of the letter is available online (from computers with Cornell IP addresses) at http://www.cit.cornell.edu/policy/memos/riaa.html.

A settlement letter alleges that the recipient has committed a copyright infringement by illegally uploading or downloading copyrighted material over a peer-to-peer file-sharing network, and asks the recipient to settle the claim before a lawsuit is filed, presumably by making a payment. The typical letter claims that the amount of a settlement would be considerably less than it would be after a lawsuit is filed. The letters seen so far demand a response in 10 days or less.

"We believe we should give students a heads-up, and that they should take these notices seriously," said Susan Murphy, vice president for student and academic services. In addition to a mass e-mailing, she said, the university has purchased an advertisement on Facebook to help inform students.

The new approach means that the university now could receive three types of notices from the RIAA or other content providers when illegal file sharing is alleged:

All these notices are sent to the university in its role as an Internet service provider (ISP) and refer to a specific IP address. The university has decided to treat settlement letters in the same way as DMCA notices: Outgoing traffic from the IP address is blocked, and the notice is forwarded to the student with a cover letter stating that the block will be lifted when the student certifies that the illegal material has been removed from the computer or responds with an argument that the activity is legal or that a mistake has been made. Cornell forwards preservation notices as an advisory to the student that a content owner has identified their network activity as potentially violating copyright.

In none of these cases, Mitrano said, does the university reveal the identity of the student to the complainers. In the case of preservation notices, the information collected is turned over only on receipt of a valid subpoena.

The university received a few preservation notices a couple of years ago, only one of which ripened into a subpoena, Mitrano said. Among the Ivies, she added, Cornell is still known for having a low number of notices and the smallest number, one, of official subpoenas.

From there on it is a matter between the alleged infringer and the copyright owner. "The important message is that Cornell does not generate these notices and is not a party; we are only passing them on, and the student has a basic legal right and should consult an attorney," Mitrano explained. She also warned that along with the RIAA, owners of copyright in movies, TV shows, video games and other material are also aggressively monitoring the Internet for illegal file-sharing activity.

The DMCA specifically exempts ISPs from liability as long as the ISP has no knowledge of the activity and acts to stop it once notified. "It would be in the interest of the content industry to have colleges and universities forego ISP immunity," Mitrano said. But when the university has no prior knowledge of any infringing activity because it does not routinely monitor what flows across its networks, it acts only as a conduit to the content activity, she said. "As a research institution we believe [monitoring] would chill free speech and inquiry and contravene the kind of open communicative values that support our missions," she added.

Recently, she said, she has learned from colleagues at other institutions that the RIAA has sent out many preservation notices as well as the new settlement letters. She suggested this may be a tactic whereby the content industry "throws everything at us [higher education]" to create confusion and generate publicity and perhaps to create "an exasperating amount of administrative burden" that will prompt some colleges and universities to make the decision to take the preventive action of blocking all file-sharing activity on their networks.

John Vaughn, executive vice president of the Association of American Universities, testified last week before a House of Representatives subcommittee investigating illegal file-sharing that no satisfactory technology exists for the purpose of eliminating just the allegedly offending material and that higher education should approach the issue from their strengths: citizenship and education.

Mitrano agrees. While copyright infringement on the part of students using their own computers may not incur direct liability of Cornell University, she said, "In order educate people to what is going on, we must educate people on these larger issues of the proper balance between incentive and innovation in copyright law." She added, "Maybe one of our students will pioneer the business model that will synchronize social norms with law and contemporary technology."