Campus Lawsuits Against P2P != Stopping File Sharing
The NPD Group's latest music stats provide yet another reason that the RIAA's war on college students is misguided: … This data suggests offline sharing is growing, and that's to be expected. Along with burning CDs and DVDs for each other …
Context & Ripple Effects
The EFF is leaning on fresh [[a:/entity/the-npd-group|NPD Group]] music statistics to argue that the RIAA's campus litigation campaign — part of a broader drive that has seen individuals sued for $750 to $30,000 per song since late 2006 — is failing at its stated goal. Per the data, file sharing persists despite the suits, and offline swapping such as burned CDs and DVDs is growing.
The critique lands amid an escalating enforcement apparatus: agreed-upon-expert safeguards now govern RIAA hard-drive inspections in these disputes, while the group's parallel push on internet radio royalties through its SoundExchange spin-off shows deterrence being pursued on multiple fronts at once.
First-order effects
- Students targeted in campus suits remain exposed to per-song statutory damages even though the NPD data indicates the lawsuits have not suppressed sharing behavior.
- The RIAA's public rationale for the campus campaign — that litigation deters infringement — takes a direct evidentiary hit, handing EFF-aligned critics a data-backed talking point.
Second-order effects
- If P2P-focused enforcement keeps missing its target, pressure logically migrates toward intermediaries — universities and network operators — to act as copyright police where individual suits have not.
- Growth in offline CD and DVD swapping moves activity outside the network monitoring that makes infringement measurable, meaning enforcement metrics will increasingly understate actual sharing.
Third-order effects
- A pattern of aggressive individual suits — including pursuing a deceased defendant's children in Warner Bros. v. Scantlebury — risks eroding public support faster than it deters infringement, pushing the industry toward collective-licensing and royalty-collection structures of the SoundExchange type.
- If copying keeps migrating to unmeasurable channels, policy debates over campus copyright will rest on progressively weaker usage data, favoring intermediary-mandate approaches over evidence-based deterrence.
The trend: Music-industry enforcement is shifting from suing individual file-sharers toward compelling institutions and intermediaries to police access, even as copying spreads into channels litigation cannot measure.