Standing up for student privacy, the University of Oregon has refused to identify “alleged infringers” at record labels’ request. Unlike most universities, which have identified students, U of O recently moved to quash the labels’ discovery subpoena in Arista et al. v. Does 1-17. Ray Beckerman links the documents at Recording Industry vs The People. See also Associated Press.

The university argues in its brief that the subpoena imposes an undue burden on the university “because it requires the University to affirmatively investigate potential copyright infringement by its users.” Particularly on a campus, where a single IP address might be shared my multiple roommates, visitors, or users of an open access point, the IP address will not uniquely identify a person. The U of O doesn’t want to go net-fishing, as the record labels do, turning over student names that might match their complaint, but says it would have to “undertake an investigation of all the individuals who were or who may have been present in the shared rooms in question at the time of the alleged acts of copyright infringement,” including interviews and forensic investigations, in order to turn over the right names. Even where the university can find the occupant of a single room, that identifies only the occupant, “not the identity of the user engaged in the alleged copyright infringement.”

The university should not be forced to do the record labels’ investigations for them. As I’ve argued in The Crimson and at Cornell, this demand conflicts with the mission of a university. As Oregon puts it, “The University … has both a legal and an ethical obligation to ensure that its students’ right to privacy is protected under the law and defended against intrusion.”

While Oregon’s other arguments are weaker, this one is enough. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure proscribe subpoenas that subject their recipients to “undue burden” and the University of Oregon demonstrates that complying thoroughly and responsibly with this subpoena would place severe and unjustified burden on the educational institution.