Students Suing i2Hub for RIAA Settlements

This showed up a few days ago, but I just noticed it today as it was mentioned on This Week in Tech. Apparently quite a few students from UMASS are suing the creator of i2Hub because they were targeted by the RIAA for sharing music on the Internet 2 P2P network. Absurdity like this is possible now because of the dangerous precedent set by the Grokster fiasco–a P2P company can now be held liable if the court determines that the company was promoting their illegal filesharing aspects.

What is there to say? These students obviously can’t deal with the fact that they were caught red-handed, and they’re now playing ignorant as a way to distance themselves from their responsibility. Given the litigious frenzy of the RIAA these past few years, I think it would be extremely unlikely that these college-aged students were completely unaware of the legality of their actions.

From comments I gather around my campus, which is just down the street from UMASS, students are more interested in knowing how to download safely. This leads me to believe that many students are well aware of what they’re doing, they just don’t want to get caught. These i2Hub users probably deluded themselves into thinking they were completely safe by sharing on Internet 2, which is a seperate network from the general internet and pretty much inaccessible for people outside of academia. In their shock at actually being targeted by the RIAA, they decided to go after the creator of i2Hub instead of accepting that they were at fault. Somehow, I find this scenario far more likely than plain ignorance.

Perhaps I’m being a bit harsh. I still don’t agree at all with the RIAA’s sue-happy campaign, I’m just more annoyed that these students are trying to blame someone else by playing dumb instead of owning up. There were times when sharing data used to be completely safe, but those days are gone. I’m not a stranger to the world of file-sharing, neither are most of the people I know, but it is certainly a more dangerous game now than it used to be. Until the MPAA and the RIAA stop their blindly ineffective lawsuit campaign, anyone using P2P will just have to be careful; you’re still technically at fault, even if the lawsuit is unfair.

WSJ.com - Students Want File-Sharing Site To Pay for RIAA Settlements