RIAA to sue 25 Princeton students

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) will file federal copyright lawsuits today against 25 Princeton students accused of illegally trading files on the Internet2 network, industry president Cary Sherman announced Tuesday.

A total of 405 students at 18 colleges nationwide will be targeted for lawsuits as part of the industry trade group's latest campaign to curb file swapping on college campuses, Sherman said in a conference call.

The RIAA sent 39 "pre-subpoena" notices to Princeton in late March, but indicated Tuesday that it intends to sue no more than 25 students at any one college.

"There are 14 lucky students who will have escaped a lawsuit and 25 who will be sued," Sherman said.

University spokesman Eric Quinones could not confirm whether any of the 39 targeted students had been notified as of Tuesday.

"When we received the notices of pending subpoenas last month, we did notify all of the students associated with the computers where the alleged acts of infringement occurred," he said in an email. "The University would notify students upon receipt of any subpoenas from the RIAA, which has not yet occurred."

Though Sherman did not specify which 14 students had been dropped from the list, he said that most of the students targeted during this latest wave of litigation engaged heavily in music piracy, sharing an average of 2,300 songs. Even the RIAA does not currently know the names of the individuals they are suing. The lawsuits being filed today are termed "John Doe" suits because they mention only the violating students' IP addresses. The RIAA must wait for the court to issue a subpoena before it can approach the University and request the identities of the students in question.

The latest attack by the RIAA on campus file-sharing takes aim at students downloading music on Internet2, a high-powered research network operated by 207 universities and affiliated institutions nationwide.

Sherman said that Internet2 is a promising network that allows students and educators to work quickly and efficiently, but that it has been hijacked for illegal purposes.

"Internet2 is increasingly becoming the network of choice for students seeking to steal copyrighted songs and other works on a massive scale," Sherman said. "We simply cannot allow Internet2 to become a zone of lawlessness where the normal rules don't apply."

The file-sharing program i2hub, which runs on the Internet2 network, was previously thought to be safe from the industry's legal grasp.

"I2hub has, for some reason, been thought to be a safe zone to engage in illegal activity," Sherman said, "and what we wanted to do was puncture that misconception and let people know that when you are on the Internet, there's really no such thing as a safe zone for lawlessness."

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Sherman also called on college administrators to curtail music downloading on their campuses.

"University presidents can take action to stop illegal file-sharing," he said. "They don't turn the other way when somebody engages in plagiarism, and I don't think they should be turning the other way when somebody engages in copyright infringement either."

Associate Dean of Undergraduate Students Hilary Herbold said the University is committed to addressing the problem of music piracy. "We take illegal file-sharing seriously because it violates the law and because it's a misappropriation of property," she said in an email last week.