U of Tennessee student says RIAA subpoena violates federal privacy law
A University of Tennessee student is attempting to quash an RIAA subpoena issued as part of the music industry's war against on-campus file-sharing. Doe #28 is taking a different tack than other defendants have …
Context & Ripple Effects
The RIAA's campus campaign has spent 2007 running into resistance. In June, a Boston University student fought an attempt to discover the names behind IP addresses, and days later a judge ruled that students can respond directly to John Doe lawsuits before being unmasked — a structural crack in the subpoena-first playbook. The EFF separately argued that same month that suing campuses does not actually stop file-sharing.
Against that backdrop, Doe #28 at the University of Tennessee is trying something different from earlier defendants: instead of contesting only the IP-to-name discovery step, the move to quash frames the subpoena itself as a violation of federal privacy law. It lands weeks after the RIAA was ordered to pay nearly $70,000 in attorneys' fees in the Capitol v. Foster case — evidence that wrongly aimed lawsuits carry a measurable price tag.
First-order effects
- Doe #28 gains a second legal front beyond the Boston-style name-discovery fight, forcing the RIAA to defend its subpoenas on privacy-law grounds rather than just procedural ones.
- The University of Tennessee, already the target of the subpoena, now has a student-led template for pushing back on the industry's on-campus identification requests.
Second-order effects
- If the privacy-law framing holds anywhere, expect other John Doe defendants in the campus wave to copy it, raising the per-suit litigation cost that the Foster fee award just demonstrated can run to tens of thousands of dollars.
- Universities caught between the RIAA's subpoena volume and their own students gain grounds to demand stricter verification before releasing any records — the EFF's argument that campus lawsuits do not curb sharing gives them little reason not to.
Third-order effects
- A pattern where every subpoena meets a quash motion backed by privacy statutes would push the industry's anti-piracy strategy away from cheap bulk John Doe filings and toward individually negotiated settlements or legislative routes.
- For higher education generally, repeated courtroom standoffs over student records could harden into standing policy that campus networks log less identifying data — shrinking the subpoena pipeline at its source.
The trend: The music industry's 2007 campus litigation blitz is colliding with a maturing defense playbook — privacy-law quash motions, direct John Doe responses, and fee awards against failed suits — that makes each subpoena more expensive than the last.