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Melissa Eisele

Pulse Reporter


Downloading music, movies and television shows without paying for them is a federal crime. Still, many college students choose not to care that the illicit downloading could result in a prison term.

Download Legal, a new student advocacy group providing a forum to discuss intellectual property and educating students about illegal file sharing and the impact it has, is trying to deter the infringement of copyright laws.

"Students should be provided with an active voice in the intellectual property debate, especially given the fact that they are the primary users of the content that appears on file-sharing services, such as Kazaa," said Brooklyn Burgess, executive director of Download Legal, in a press release.

History of Download Legal

Download Legal, launched in February, is the brainchild of Burgess, a University of Alabama third-year law student. She said the idea originally came to her after she took classes on intellectual property law and worked in Washington, D.C.

"Last summer I worked in Washington, and I was working on some projects to do with piracy and intellectual property rights and that kind of thing," Burgess said, "and I really started thinking about the issue and started researching, and there is not a national student organization that did this - that brought everybody together."

And so it began. Burgess said she then asked around for people who would be interested in the issue. Little by little, the movement began to grow.

Burgess said she isn't sure how many members the group has now because members join through the Web site, www.downloadlegal.org, and their information goes straight to a database, to which she doesn't have access.

Truth behind Download Legal

But don't be duped by Download Legal's seemingly altruistic goals of educating downloaders of the dangers of file swapping and promoting and protecting intellectual property rights.

Download Legal's Web site was created by a firm called Rightclick Strategies, which Mark Schultz, a law professor who teaches an intellectual property law course at SIUC, describes as an "Internet political consulting firm that develops Web sites for members of Congress and runs web-based advocacy campaigns."

Among Rightclick Strategies' management team is founder Larry Purpuro, who is the former deputy chief of staff for the Republican National Committee.

Burgess confirmed that Rightclick Strategies did the Web site for Download Legal, but a spokesperson for Rightclick Strategies would not return calls for comment.

Where does Download Legal, a student-run organization, get the funds to have a Web site created by a firm from Washington?

Burgess said Download Legal is funded by the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America and other organizations she wouldn't mention.

Schultz wrote in an e-mail, "Downloadlegal.org has all the trademarks of a classic 'astroturf' campaign -a purported grassroots campaign that is really orchestrated from Washington, D.C. The entertainment industry should be savvy enough to realize this kind of deception is going to backfire on them, causing less respect for the law."

Truth behind the RIAA and the MPAA

Todd Herreman, an instructor in the School of Radio-Television who teaches a course on music business, said that what's going on with Download Legal is not the first time that the music industry has done something questionable to put a damper on illegal downloading.

According to a Dec. 30, 2005, Business Week article, Sony BMG, a member of the RIAA, settled a class-action lawsuit against the recording giant for secretly putting rootkit software on millions of distributed CDs. According to the article, "The program, which burrowed into listeners' PCs, was designed to prevent purchasers from making more than three copies of those discs."

But a nasty side effect of the program was that it hid itself within Microsoft Windows operating system, which made systems with the program highly susceptible to hackers and virus writers.

Legal consequences of illegal downloading

MP3.com reported in early February that the total number of people sued for file-sharing is about 17,000, and according to Wired News, on Feb. 17, the music industry filed lawsuits against 532 people, which raises the number of people sued by the music industry this year to 1,063.

These people face two forms of legal consequence for the act of illegal file sharing. If they are found liable to the copyright owner, they can be forced to pay damages of up to $150,000 per work stolen; however, Schultz said most of these cases settle out of court at a much lower cost.

If prosecuted under the No Electronic Theft Act, the offender can be imprisoned for up to seven years, but he said most of these cases apply to "warez" traders-illegal traders of software.

The consequences for the RIAA, which includes Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Entertainment, Warner Brothers Music and BMG Entertainment, are much greater. According to the RIAA, the industry loses $4.2 billion annually to worldwide piracy.

The consequences are similar for the members of the MPAA, which includes Buena Vista Picture Distribution, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Universal City Studios LLP and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. A Smith Barney survey estimates that the motion picture industry lost $5.4 billion in 2005 because of piracy.

Illegal downloading at SIUC

Don Olson, director of Information Technology at the University, said illegal downloading has not been a problem at SIUC, but they do try to discourage students from doing it.

"We shape the bandwidth to make it inconvenient for them to download a lot of things," he said.

When there is a problem, Olson said they tell the student to stop or else the student will face major consequences.

"If we get a complaint from the RIAA, or something like that, we contact the student, and if they don't take it down, we then report them to the Student Affair judicial committee," Olson said.

He said it is a problem that has diminished over the years, but it is still a problem that hurts everyone on campus.

"Illegal downloading hurts everybody because if you take up bandwidth, it makes response times slow for people doing research on the Internet," Olson said.

International problem of illegal downloading

The problem of illegal download is not a problem in the United States alone. It is a problem that countries around the world are dealing with as well.

 An example is the recent banning of downloading or using the file sharing program Kazaa in Australia.

On Feb. 21, authorities in Belgium and Switzerland shut down the Razorback2 network. At the time, Razorback2 could assist in the file sharing of about 1.3 million users at one time. The system was used to share movies, software, games, TV shows and music.