Ten Australian Universities are facing claims for compensation and possible legal action for allowing students and staff to copy music on their networks. The Australian Record Industry Association has decided to go after them. "There is a real culture of copyright infringement in Australian universities," says the head of ARIA's anti-piracy operation, Michael Speck, "the university's own fingerprints is on the activity." Implying that university staff are as much to blame as the students.
Amongst the ten targets, the South Australian and New South Wales universities claimed to have no knowledge of music piracy happening on their networks but ARIA says, "prevent it from happening, compensate the victims properly and punish those responsible for misusing the systems." ARIA did admit that sometimes it wasn't the university itself to blame directly but seems determined to chase them for turning a blind eye. At least one of the ten universities has suspended staff pending their own investigations.
News source: The Inquirer
Amongst the ten targets, the South Australian and New South Wales universities claimed to have no knowledge of music piracy happening on their networks but ARIA says, "prevent it from happening, compensate the victims properly and punish those responsible for misusing the systems." ARIA did admit that sometimes it wasn't the university itself to blame directly but seems determined to chase them for turning a blind eye. At least one of the ten universities has suspended staff pending their own investigations.
News source: The Inquirer
Meanwhile, the University of Tasmania has denied the allegations and brought in its legal beagles. It is difficult to know if this is because they have a genuine policy of stopping file sharing on their systems or if it's because ARIA are claiming it "might ultimately become a matter of hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation." Not the sort of money any university likes to part with.
The story runs a parallel with the Recording Industry Association of America which managed to get its first conviction of someone illegally trading music on the Internet back in 1999. The guilty party was a university student and ever since then universities in the US have been kept under close scrutiny.
Michael Speck of ARIA, while being interviewed for ABC News' The World Today concluded with, "if these institutions who live and die by their own copyright aren't prepared to do any more than pay lip service to anyone else's copyright, they'll be in the courts. They'll be before the courts." A tough line to take but we've come to expect nothing less from the recording industry and its protectors.
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