Music Piracy's Top Five

Students know that sharing copyrighted files is illegal but the practice continues on almost every campus in the country. More and more the RIAA is fighting back.

The RIAA released the hounds on a new round of illegal file sharers this week. Thousands of individual students and dozens of universities and colleges have received official complaints for sharing or downloading as little as one single copyrighted song over their school's network. Larger violators may find themselves on the receiving end of major civil lawsuits.

The consequences for students who are identified in these lower priority complaints receive anything from a stern warning to the disconnection of their dorm room's network access. Repeat violators risk additional consequences including mandatory anti-piracy training sessions to academic suspensions.

In this latest round of complaints the Associated Press reports that Ohio University tops the list with nearly 1300 complaints. Purdue ranks a close second followed by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of Tennessee, and University of South Carolina. The realization of this report is significant. Efforts by the RIAA and higher education to combat illegal music piracy have been ineffective. It is the belief of this author that the battle against music piracy needs to be fought in the younger grades, to instill a set of morals and ethics to build student's respect for copyright from a younger age.