RIAA Pushes Students to Darknets

Filed in archive RIAA, IFPI , Society & Public Policy on May 15, 2007

As predicted here and by other industry experts, the harder the entertainment industry pushes consumers, the harder they will push back with more evasive technologies.

The renewed RIAA offensive on colleges is a perfect case in point. Students in particular are tech savvy, concentrated, and highly social, a recipe for a rise in darknets, or closed private networks, that cannot be monitored by RIAA and their agents.

Ohio University rates as one of RIAA's successes, that is, if you only count PR. RIAA pressured several schools, including Ohio U, which received 1,200 copyright infringement notices, to crack down on their students. Ohio U is one of the few schools to cooperate and banned P2P on campus. The result - students used Direct Connect P2P software to create darknet hubs.