Four university students sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for peer-to-peer song file swapping have agreed to pay thousands to settle the suits.
"I don't believe that I did anything wrong," one of the four, Daniel Peng of Princeton University, said in a formal statement. "I am glad that the case has been settled amicably, and I hope that, for the sake of artists, the larger issues can soon be resolved."
Peng, two students at Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute (Jesse Jordan, Aaron Sherman), and one at Michigan Technological University (Joseph Nievelt), were sued in April for running what the RIAA called "local area Napster networks" that hunted computers tied to their college networks for music files, as well as sharing music from their own computers.
RIAA senior vice president Matt Oppenheim said in a statement that the association believes it's in everyone's interest to resolve the P2P issue quickly. "(T)hese four defendants now clearly understand the seriousness with which we view this type of illegal behavior," he said in a statement. "We have also sent a clear signal to others that this kind of activity is illegal."
Peng, Jordan, Sherman, and Nievelt will pay the RIAA between $12,000 and $17,000 in annual installments through 2006, under terms of the settlement. They could have been hit for as much as $100 million had the litigation gone the distance in court and the RIAA prevailed.
Also last month, Pennsylvania State University pulled the P2P plug on 220 students they found P2Ping through the campus computer networks. That came around the time the U.S. Naval Academy disciplined about 85 midshipmen for P2Ping.
