First File-Swap Bust Just A Blip, Four Years Later

[JackSpratts]

Inara Verzemnieks

Before the tens of thousands of people snatching free music off the Internet, before the hundreds of lawsuits to make them stop, there was Jeff.

Jeff Levy, a 21-year-old planning and public-policy major at the University of Oregon, a follower of the Grateful Dead and Phish, a Massachusetts transplant with a sweet computer and an even sweeter university-supplied ethernet connection, who stepped out of the shower one day in 1999 to find FBI agents waiting at his front door.

Levy, it turned out, had been sharing music, as well as movies and computer software, over the Internet. Hundreds of files, said prosecutors, who slapped the college student with federal felony charges.

Ultimately, Levy pleaded guilty, reserving a place in history books and law reviews:

Jeffrey Gerard Levy, the first person in the nation convicted under the No Electronic Theft Act of illegally distributing copyright protected music over the Internet.

It was meant to be a cautionary tale.

"There is a cultural phenomenon here that this is not stealing, and it is particularly prevalent among young people," Roslyn Mazer, special counsel for intellectual property in the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice, told a reporter for The Oregonian in 1999. "We hope this case will fire a shot across the bow."

But as 261 copyright lawsuits filed earlier this month by the Recording Industry Association of America indicate, swapping music over the Internet has become more entrenched in the years since Levy's case, with everyone from a 12-year-old girl to a Yale college professor ending up in the industry's dragnet.

"It was like my story had disappeared," said Levy, 26 now, working at a plant nursery and living in a one-bedroom Springfield cottage with posters of Ani DiFranco, Sarah McLachlan and a diagram of guitar chords tacked to the living room walls.

At the time of Levy's bust, swapping music over the Internet was in its nascent stages, nowhere as common as it is today; it took time and a certain amount of technological know-how to hunt down songs in the wilds of cyberspace.

But in the months after Levy's arrest, all that changed when a file-swapping program called Napster burst onto the scene, making it simple for even the most technologically challenged to find and trade digital music for free -- and to violate copyright law.

At the height of the Napster craze, 10,000 songs a second were traded, according to company estimates. Even his father, Levy said, turned to Napster to track down hard-to-find songs from his native France.

"It was like it wasn't as bad anymore, that the average Joe citizen was doing it," Levy said. "The attitude seemed to be: It was everyone now, so it was OK."

Looking back, Levy said, he never considered that what he was doing would land him in so much trouble, although he knew it was illegal. Maybe a letter or a phone call from the university computer folks reprimanding him. But never the FBI.

Even as agents were standing in his apartment, Levy was looking around, he recalled, racking his brain to figure out why they would be there. Then he saw his computer.

He thought what he was doing was like "collecting baseball cards," he said, snapping up as many copies of music, software, games and movies as he could, cataloging them, then arranging swaps with others he met through Internet Relay Chat. A lot of swaps. Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean Hoar, who prosecuted the case, placed the value of everything Levy gave away in the thousands of dollars.

So much traffic was streaming to and from Levy's site that it attracted UO system administrators' attention. And then the feds arrived at his door.

Levy pleaded guilty and received two years' probation. He couldn't have Internet access without a parole officer's permission; he couldn't have a CD burner. And a felony conviction would follow him forever.

For about two weeks, Levy said, the story of the first person convicted under the NET Act was everywhere: on the evening news and VH1. In Spin and Rolling Stone magazines. In every major newspaper. Chuck D talked about him on MTV.

"And then," he said, "it was over pretty quickly."

The story faded. Jeff Levy was forgotten. And file sharing, for everyone else, took off.

Quietly, Levy graduated from the UO, worked as a teacher at an outdoor school in California, then returned to Oregon and landed a job at a nursery. He has planted a lush garden -- foxgloves, dahlias, lavender, creeping Jennie -- outside the house he shares with his girlfriend.

A computer perches on a desk in a living room corner, but Levy said he doesn't use it often. He last checked his e-mail three weeks ago; he's just not much interested in computers anymore. "They lost their charm for me," he said.

So did downloading music. "It doesn't even occur to me now," he said. A 400-disc CD changer sits in the living room along with a turntable and a stack of vinyl. He hates the sound of MP3s, he said. "I can hear what's lost."

He got rid of his TV two years ago, but he has read about the RIAA lawsuits, how the recording industry is suing people of all ages all over the country.

"Smart," he said.

Because now, it's not just a story about one person. They've made people think, he said, that "they could be next."
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