Why Is Harvard Escaping the RIAA’s Wrath?

The RIAA has sent out 4,157 prelitigation settlement letters to a total of 160 schools this year, but Harvard’s mailboxes have remained noticeably empty. And it’s not for a lack of potentially illegal music downloading. More likely, Ars Technica speculates, the recording industry is afraid of two Harvard Law professors who are publicly hostile toward the anti-file-sharing crusade.

Charles Nesson and John Palfrey accuse the RIAA of acting like a “bully facing someone much weaker” and have preemptively said the school shouldn’t “be carrying the industry’s water.” Although an RIAA spokesman says that “just because a school has not received letters does not imply that it will not receive letters in the future,” it’s likely that antagonizing the institution would provoke the legal heavyweights.