RIAA Top Gun Defends Prosecuting On-Campus Illegal Downloads

March 12, 2007

Recording Industry Association of America President Cary Sherman told House Judiciary subcommittee on courts, ihe Internet and intellectual property on Thursday that more than half of colleage students acquire music illegally.

Parsing out the numbers provided by research firm NPD and cited by Sherman in his testimony, that would be 1.3 billion illegal music downloads in 2006.

Sherman added the RIAA's policy of notifying (and sometimes suing) college students and universities for these illegal downloads has helped stem some students from either starting or continuing the process.

When Association of American Universities executive vice-president John Vaughn told the same committee that some colleges use file-trading programs implicated in these downloads for legitimate research, Sherman responded: Nobody's using (file-sharing services) for Shakespeare's sonnets."

Yes, John, but if one of those sonnets was set to music..