Following the lead of the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America filed a wave of lawsuits against people who share copyrighted movies over \Person2Person"" networks.
The MPAA's lawsuits make use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which grants corporations the ability to fine file-sharers. A fine of $30,000 can be charged for each movie traded over the Internet, and as much as $150,000 can be charged if the movie was distributed willfully, the MPAA said in a statement.
Similar to the RIAA, the MPAA will target many college students. A student's access to high-speed connections, as well as their relatively small disposable incomes, could lead to piracy hounds making them prime targets for lawsuits.
The lawsuits have already had their effect upon some UW-Madison students. One student, who would only speak on the condition of anonymity, has already changed his file-sharing ways. At one point he had hundreds of movies on his computer, but stopped trading them because of law.
""When someone is online, it seems as though you're anonymous, and when you're anonymous you feel free to download music, movies, whatever,"" the student said. ""When the MPAA and RIAA started serving these lawsuits, it opened my eyes that you couldn't just do all that stuff. They have ways of finding you. It's just too risky.""
UW-Madison already has tools in place to limit file-sharing. For over a year, University Housing placed limits on the amount of bandwidth that can be used by P2P programs, said Department of Information Technology Communications Manager Brian Rust. However, this limit was not placed to protect students from litigation; instead it was placed to conserve the amount of bandwidth for all students in housing to use.
While access is limited to students in university housing, they are still susceptible to MPAA and RIAA lawsuits. According to Rust, the associations can get the internet IDs of file-sharers, proceed to contact DoIT, or whichever Internet service provider is allowing access and give them a cease and desist letter. The ISP must pass this letter onto whoever used the file-sharing program.
As part of the MPAA's anti-piracy program, they are releasing a free program that identifies any material on a computer which infringes upon their copyrights. Once the files have been identified, they can be easily deleted, thus absolving the user from any litigation.
