Hollywood sues hundreds over downloading

The movie and music industry is suing hundreds of people for downloading copyrighted songs and movies on the ultra-fast network internet2 only available to universities at the moment. The suit reaches 18 universities and up to 405 students who, according to the music industry, have shared files over the high-speed network. The penalties mounts to $750 per song, and with an average of 2300 songs downloaded (on average) per person, it’s a whopping $1.725M that we’re talking about. I guess that this will chill a lot of enthusiasm for copyrighted file sharing.

This legal battle has been initiated by both the music and movie industry as a show of force to try to stem what they call a “piracy epidemic”: “Our goal with these suits is to make people aware of the piracy epidemic across the country,” … “They think they’re anonymous but they’re not. And they’re stealing copyrighted material.” A few Universities already said that they were going to cooperate and it is likely that they will provide the names of the students involved in the file sharing.

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