Free Legal Advice Offered for Accused Music Pirates
Students in San Francisco’s Bay Area have an ally if the Recording Industry Association of America comes knocking and accuses them of pirating music.
The college students can turn to the University of San Francisco’s legal clinic—part of the Internet and Intellectual Property Justice Project—that aims to match tech-savvy law students with “frightened” undergrads threatened with litigation by the RIAA, the San Jose Mercury News reports.
“It helped. I didn’t feel so alone,” one unnamed San Francisco State undergrad is quoted saying. The student had been told to pay $6,000 in 20 days or face up to a $20,000 fine.
The RIAA has aggressively targeted colleges in the past year in its crackdown on illegally downloaded music. Students, tracked through their IP addresses, are often sent pre-litigation letters asking them to pay between $3,000 to $6,000.
One of the clinic’s students, Jonathan Jaffe, says part of the job is to let the RIAA targets know what their options are and to tell them that, “It is not the end of the world.”
“There is a great sense of isolation among these students,” Jaffe adds. “When they get the letter, they’re scared and embarrassed to admit it to friends. So they don’t know that many others are in the same situation.”
