Privacy Digest

Music industry wins UW IDs in file-sharing case - Wisconsin State Journal: "As many as 53 UW-Madison students could be slapped with lawsuits by the music recording industry after a federal judge on Wednesday ordered the university to surrender their names and other information for sharing digital music files over the Internet.

On Tuesday, 16 record companies represented by the Recording Industry Association of America filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court seeking the names associated with 53 Internet connections for copyright infringement. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge John Shabaz signed an order requiring UW-Madison to relinquish the names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and Media Access Control addresses for each of the 53 individuals.

The lawsuit and decision came as no surprise to the university, which last month declined to send out 'settlement letters' from the RIAA to alleged copyright violators among UW-Madison students.

'We had every indication that they were going to be going in this direction,' said Ken Frazier, interim chief information officer at UW-Madison. 'It's the step the RIAA would have to take to get the identity of a user of our network.'

The RIAA's 'John Doe' lawsuit asks that users associated with the 53 IP (Internet Protocol) address - a series of numbers given to a computer connection on the Internet - be turned over to the record companies named in the lawsuit.

John Doe lawsuits are a routine step that the RIAA takes to learn the identities of those whom it suspects of illegally sharing copyrighted music over the Internet. Generally, RIAA investigators monitor peer-to-peer file-sharing networks - in the UW-Madison case those were the Gnutella and AresWarez networks - and take down the IP addresses of those who are sharing files.

The 53 UW-Madison IP addresses accounted for 24,977 shared audio files, according to court documents.

The RIAA used to directly subpoena the names of those subscribers from Internet service providers, but in 2003 an appeals court ruled that such information could only be obtained under the supervision of a judge. That led to the use of John Doe lawsuits.

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(Read Original Article - Via Wisconsin State Journal.)