College students face lawsuits on file sharing

By Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — The major record labels, in an ongoing battle about digital music piracy, on Tuesday announced plans to sue college students who use a super-high-speed campus network to share songs.
The Recording Industry Association of America will file copyright infringement lawsuits against 405 students at 18 schools today. Separately, the Motion Picture Association of America plans to file an unspecified number of lawsuits targeting students at seven campuses, including Princeton, Columbia University, Ohio State and the University of California-San Diego.

The universities are part of the Internet2 network, a consortium of 200 schools, government agencies and corporations that use it for collaborative research.

RIAA President Cary Sherman says Internet2 has been "hijacked" by students for more than just education. Many are sharing copyrighted files, he says — the equivalent of 175 CDs worth on average.

The recording companies have filed more than 9,000 lawsuits against song swappers since September 2003, mostly against users of file-sharing programs such as Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster.

A new media swap network, i2hub, has become a popular way for students to tap into the Internet2 network and download songs, movies and games at lightning-fast speed.

"The i2hub (was) for some reason thought to be a safe zone, and what we wanted to do was puncture that misconception," Sherman says.

I2Hub advertises itself as the "largest student community in the world, with hundreds of thousands of users."

Founder Wayne Chang said in a statement that i2Hub "does not condone activities and actions that breach the rights of copyright owners."

The music industry has been trying to recover from a protracted sales decline. While sales bounced back minimally, 2%, in 2004, Sherman says, they're down 8% to 9% this year.

Internet2 CEO Douglas Van Houweling says he isn't surprised that students are sharing songs on the ad hoc network, but that it does not engage in enforcement activities.

"The industry and the universities need to deal with it," he said.

Internet2 says it connects schools at a rate 20,000 times faster than the average broadband connection. "Our focus is on creating the Internet of the future," says Van Houweling.

Since the RIAA lawsuits began, file-sharing has become more widespread. In March, about 8.5 million people were logged into peer-to-peer (P2P) networks at any one time. That compares with the 6.8 million logged into P2P networks in June 2003, when the RIAA first announced its intention to file lawsuits.

Phil Leigh, an analyst for Inside Digital Media, predicts the new legal onslaught against students will scare them — at first. "Then they'll find another way to circumvent the system. Students will see it as a challenge," he says.