On a recent weekday afternoon, a 19-year-old college freshman named Shawn sat in his dorm room at the University of Southern California and broke the law: He illegally downloaded a copyrighted song off the Internet.
Shawn knows all about the record company lawsuits against those who download without permission -- including more than 500 filed last month -- and ongoing investigations by the Recording Industry Assn. of America into downloading activities. And he doesn't care.
"The lawsuits are a joke," Shawn says. "That doesn't stop me and my friends. It gives us something to joke about. When I'm downloading a song, I'll say, [sarcastically] 'Here I go breaking the law again. Hope I don't get sued.' "
Across town at UCLA, Jessica, a third-year sociology major, has developed a firm rule to avoid getting in trouble: "Don't share files; don't get caught."
That doesn't mean, however, that Jessica has stopped downloading music. Her desktop computer in her dorm is full of songs by Britney Spears and Radiohead, all taken illegally from file-sharing services like Kazaa and Morpheus.
She noticed that the lawsuits focused on Internet users who made their song file libraries available to others and who traded more than 1,000 songs. By making her files inaccessible to other downloaders and by keeping their number well under 1,000, she feels confident she won't get sued.
"I have friends who say I should just buy the CDs," she says. "But I don't have the money."
Shawn and Jessica (their last names, like other students quoted in this story, aren't given to protect their privacy) are just the kind of people who scare the entertainment industry to death. Alarmed at the drop-off in album sales in recent years and at the increasing ease of movie downloading, the music and film industries have been working feverishly to change attitudes about their products, whether it's with lawsuits or advertisements or working with colleges to cut down on downloading.
Is it working? The RIAA says yes, noting that 56% of college students polled last month were supportive of the downloading crackdowns. In an e-mail, Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the RIAA, said: "Students are learning both that 'sharing' music on peer-to-peer networks without permission of the copyright holder is illegal and that there are terrific legal alternatives for getting their music online..... This transition won't occur overnight, but we're making real progress."
