I think the worst any normal person might get is a warning letter. Perhaps some of the heavy dealers will get sued, but I doubt even heavy dealing college students will get nailed.
Practically a quarter of the people I know at university (including me) have gotten a scolding from the university because they received a letter from some Hotshot Movie or Game Producer saying Mr. SoandSo is sharing a bootleg movie or game. They got me because they thought I was sharing Half-Life, even though it was only an update to Half-Life
. But all the university did was tell me to Stop Sharing!, and they turned my internet back on.
So no biggie. It will be the same for music sharing.
I doubt the RIAA will want to piss off all the universities across the nation by singling out a few students. Almost everyone I know who owns a computer uses Kazaa, and probably half of those people have a couple thousand songs. That's more than a third of the university of 20,000 or so that shares a ****load of files on a 24/7 basis. The RIAA ain't going to single out a few and start suing; I don't think the universties would stand for that.
Most likely the universities will receive a bunch of letters from the RIAA or whoever the **** does it, and start implementing their own policy to stop the sharing of music. Perhaps they'll do it technologically by blocking the sharing of music somehow (which is possible, they already have slowed down P2P dling and uploading to worse than 56k at my university); or they'll just issue fines or whatever. But no one will be sued... unless it's some low-rent college that sends scholarships to students in the backswamps of Louisiana
and just doesn't give a ****.
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