<p>Ninety-nine cents to download a song on iTunes sounds like a good deal, especially if you compare it to the $5,000 penalty Delwin Olivan 08 paid last fall to settle a lawsuit brought against him by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for illegally downloading music in his dorm room. Olivan is one of more than 60 Princeton students who have been served with civil complaints by the RIAA over the last three years for illegally downloading music, prompting the University to strengthen its efforts to educate students that downloading songs and films for free on the Internet is theft.</p>
<p>Olivan and his roommate, Sean Gleason 08, are fighting back against the RIAA in their own puckish way. They have created a Web site, <a href="http://www.freedelwin.org%5B/url%5D">www.freedelwin.org</a>, and are attempting to earn back Olivans $5,000 settlement by selling T-shirts and wristbands with the defiant logo, Free Delwin. So far the pair have raised more than $1,300 and created a minor sensation in music chat rooms on the Web.</p>
<p>Concerns over downloading first arose in the late 90s with the debut of Napster, a Web site that allowed users to download any of the millions of songs in its library at no cost. Fearing loss of CD sales and copyright fees, the recording industry successfully lobbied for a law that prohibited the evasion of copyright protections, and in 2000 successfully sued Napster in federal court. Notwithstanding the introduction of iTunes and similar sites that enabled users to download songs legally for a nominal fee, the number of free and illegal downloading sites proliferated. Despite the Supreme Courts decision last year that such sites can be held liable for copyright infringements committed by their users, many remain in existence. Known as peer-to-peer or P2P sites, they are really massive file-swapping sites: Users download songs and movies directly from other users, and in turn make their own libraries available to others.</p>
<p>Beginning in 2003, the RIAA filed a host of lawsuits against individual downloaders, most of them college students, including 25 Princeton students. All those suits have been settled out of court, including one against Dan Peng 05, who paid $15,000.</p>
<p>Although the University itself has not been named in any of the suits, in 2003 it revamped its guidelines for acceptable Internet use and set forth more stringent penalties. Students caught downloading a relatively small number of files can escape with only a warning. More egregious violations defined as downloading more than 500 sound files, 10 movies, or even one newly released movie face a sliding scale of penalties. A first offender would receive three months probation, a second offender six months, and a third offender might have access to the University network terminated. Despite evidence that he had downloaded more than 4,000 songs, the RIAAs complaint against Olivan named only three specific songs, and he received a deans warning.</p>
<p>The University is hosting a number of seminars to educate students about the dos and donts of downloading, and students purchasing computers from the University now find them with iTunes preinstalled. Nevertheless, while the number of RIAA suits filed against Princeton students has declined over the last two years, the number of disciplinary actions taken by the Uni-versity against students for computer misuse, for offenses ranging from illegal downloading to the use of pirated software, has almost doubled.</p>
<p>Gleason compared downloading to jaywalking, saying, I dont see it hurting anybody except some people who need to get a reality check. But he said he has stopped because it takes too long. Im impatient, he said. </p>