Stealing is wrong, no matter what. Not even if you're just stealing the latest Britney Spears tune electronically - it's still stealing.
The Recording Industry Association of America announced earlier this week that it will sue 69 college students across the country, out of almost 500 total offenders. RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy said it's the first time MSU students have been identified through the university's system. The RIAA can force MSU to reveal the violators' identities after university officials look over complaints.
For the last three years, students have been repeatedly warned. They know there are fines for stealing copyrighted songs. They know Napster was shut down, so our sympathy can only go so far.
Violators should be punished, but the punishment should fit the crime.
Past offenders have settled with RIAA, many paying an average of $3,000. The crop of students being targeted by RIAA are illegally sharing an average of 800 copyrighted songs. If they have to settle at $3,000, that works out to almost $4 per song, much more than a CD of 10-15 songs is worth. Buying CDs is what many students are trying to avoid by downloading songs in the first place.
It's even more than the average cost of $1 per song on iTunes, a legal alternative to downloading and file sharing.
We are not too fond of RIAA's continuous crackdown on offenders, requiring everyone from a middle-schooler to a college student to pay obscenely large amounts of money as restitution. The punishment should fit the crime, and the lawsuits are yielding far too much money.
Students and other offenders have been warned in the past, but it's unfair for the RIAA to charge such large sums of money. Downloading offenders can't avoid the RIAA's wrath, so people should obey the law and buy "In the Zone" instead of just downloading five or six songs from Britney's latest CD.
