The Recording Industry Association of America's lawsuits against UW System students require university employees to devote time and money to processing complaints without reimbursement from the RIAA, according to Brian Rust, UW-Madison Department of Information Technology communications director.
The RIAA, a trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry, sought a court order commanding the university to comply with its requests for 53 students' contact information tied to IP addresses linked to illegal music downloads.
""In the scheme of things, it's a nuisance,"" Rust said. ""It's a nuisance to have to investigate and it's a nuisance to bill out what it costs to do that.""
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln recently asked the RIAA to reimburse them for the costs of finding students connected to the IP addresses from computers used to illegally download music, according to an article from the Omaha World-Herald.
""We've probably irritated the RIAA enough, just by saying we won't forward their settlement letters. We don't necessarily need to bill them for the work,"" Rust said. ""Nebraska makes a good point though, that it does cost money to have people investigate who the individuals are on the network and to send that information out.""
However, Rust said, even with charging the RIAA, UNL is probably still losing money conducting the IP address investigations.
""One of the things that I thought of when I talked to the folks at Nebraska and they said they were going to charge $11 per investigation ... it probably costs two times that to process the charge, to do the billing from Nebraska to the RIAA and then for the RIAA to cut their check,"" Rust said.
Unlike the UW System, the UNL operates under a computer system that provides a dynamic IP address—that is, a new one each time the computer is turned on, according to the Omaha World-Herald article, which inadvertently protects illegal music downloaders from getting caught.
The UNL also only keeps the IP addresses for 30 days, which also makes it difficult to determine who has downloaded music illegally and then to bring legal action against them.
UW-Madison, however, assigns permanent IP addresses to campus locations like dorms.
Rust said, as of now, it is unclear whether the RIAA will take each student to court individually.
""[The RIAA] just said they were going to be issuing subpoenas ‘soon.' I imagine if they planned to do it, it would be within a couple of weeks,"" Rust said of the pending court actions against the 53 individuals.
RIAA representatives did not return phone calls for comment Monday afternoon.
