To the Editor:

I write as a proud alumnus of Cornell University (’68) and President of the Recording Industry Association of America.

It’s encouraging to see a public conversation in the Daily Sun about music theft on college campuses and how best to address it. We also appreciate the recognition that “hardworking musicians” and others are indeed hurt when music is illegally downloaded.

The Sun draws two basic conclusions that merit a response. Why focus our efforts on college students? The numbers for starters. Virtually every piece of data confirms that file-trafficking remains a significant and disproportionate problem on college campuses. College students represented only 10 percent of the sample in an online study by market research firm NPD, yet they accounted for 26 percent of all music downloading on P2P networks and 21 percent of all P2P users in 2006. Moreover, college students surveyed by NPD reported that more than two-thirds of all the music they acquired was obtained illegally.

College students used to be our best customers. Now they are among our worst. But it’s not just the loss of current sales that concerns us. The habits students form in college will stay with them for a lifetime.

The prevalence of illegal downloading on a college campus should be as unacceptable to universities as it is to us. It is a mutual problem for the music community, universities and students as well. After all, it’s university bandwidth that’s being abused when students use networks intended for educational purposes to engage in the theft of music, movies, software and more, slowing down the network for everyone and forcing the university to spend more to increase capacity.

We know university administrators very aggressively pursue plagiarism. Yet they say nothing when their students illegally take thousands of songs without paying for them. Why the double standard? The Internet has made plagiarism difficult to control, just like illegal downloading, but no one suggests that universities should pursue a different “business model” and simply accept plagiarism.

And don’t administrators have an obligation to prepare students for the real world, where theft is simply not tolerated? A Business Software Alliance study conducted last year found that 86 percent of managers say that the file-sharing attitudes and behaviors of applicants affect their hiring decisions. Students should know that what they do online can impact their jobs, their opportunities, their future.

If “upholding the bonds of trust with its students” means turning a blind eye to theft, what does that say about the values of Cornell as an institution? Willful blindness will not make the problem go away. It only further ingrains in students the belief that a costly and illegal pastime is sanctioned, and even facilitated, by school administrators. This is a shared problem. And it requires proactive involvement and action by both the music community and our partners in the higher education community. That’s not “dirty work” — that’s defending the values that make me proud to be a Cornell alum.

Cary Sherman ’68

President, Recording Industry Association of America