The two letters may have been drastically different, but students facing issues with each after returning from spring break may have a new friend in Student Legal Services.
Pam Gerace, director of Student Legal Services, is encouraging students who received letters from the Recording Industry Association of America in response to illegal downloading to seek her organization’s help. She also said she wants to talk to students whose cars were towed at the Lake Johnson Mews apartment complex after residents failed to comply with notifications posted after students were gone on spring break.
Gerace said the letters from the RIAA, which the University forwarded to 37 students, concern prelitigation settlements and encourage recipients to contact the association within 20 days.
The trouble for the RIAA, however, is that all it has on students implicated in illegal downloading are their IP addresses, and that’s information the University won’t release, names without a legitimate subpoena.
“[The University’s] position is that they’re not releasing names until the court says otherwise,” Gerace, also an attorney at law, said. “[The RIAA has] no way of knowing the student’s name.”
But responding to the letter absolves the association’s need to do this, Gerace said, because the recipient volunteers the information.
That’s why Gerace said responding to the RIAA before speaking with legal services is the wrong move, and courts can’t discuss whether a student is guilty of copyright infringement if there’s no name attached.
“What is saving a lot of cases for students is privacy,” she said. “They can’t even get to that point because the industry doesn’t know who it’s suing.”
Student Legal Services isn’t involved with the case directly because it’s a federal matter, but Gerace said attorneys Fred Battaglia and Michael Kornbluth from Durham will handle the case.
“It’s difficult to find a law firm that wants to take on the record industry,” she said.
The RIAA has not formally issued a subpoena to the University for the names of illegal downloaders, but Gerace said the next step if this happens would be a motion to quash the subpoena. She said the courts struck a subpoena down in a similar fashion the last time the RIAA attempted to bring a lawsuit against illegal downloaders at N.C. State.
Gerace stressed that just because students haven’t responded to the letter doesn’t mean they’re off the hook, and they still need to contact her office.
“It doesn’t mean if they ignore [the letter], it will go away,” she said. “It will actually make it easier for the industry if they ignore it.”
Gerace is also trying to gather together residents of Lake Johnson Mews who were forced to pay hundreds of dollars in fines to get their cars back after their apartment complex towed them. The complex posted notices that residents should move their cars prior to a parking lot repavement.
The catch is that it didn’t notify the residents until during spring break, when many of them were out of town.
One of the affected residents, textiles graduate student Brad James, said he is contacting as many residents as he can to pursue legal action against the apartment.
“We’re all pretty much on the same page that this was improperly handled,” James said.
Gerace said students need to contact her office to get more information about possible action against the complex. She said she won’t approach the company until she has all the details of what happened and as many residents as possible on board.
But unlike the illegal downloading cases, which her office is unable to handle due to limited resources, Gerace said legal services plans on pursuing this one directly.
“We fully intend to litigate some of these cases,” Gerace said.
Gerace said her office handles more than 400 landlord-tenant cases a year, although most aren’t on this large a scale. Most are conflicts between student tenants and their landlords.
“It’s the most we ever litigate,” Gerace said.
