The Recording Industry Association of America filed suit Tuesday against students at 18 universities accused of operating file-swapping services on the supercharged Internet2 network.
The suits are the first to focus on the next-generation research network operated by universities. The i2Hub file-swapping service has operated for a year on campuses that are connected to Internet2.
Recording industry executives said i2Hub had become a serious problem over time as students believed they could not be observed trading files.
"i2Hub has been seen as a safe haven, and what we wanted to do was puncture that misconception," said Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA. "This has been a subversion of the research purposes for which Internet2 was developed."
The suits mark a substantial expansion of the record labels' approach to universities, which have been a core location of the file-swapping population since the emergence of Napster in early 1999.
The RIAA has already sued the operators of university-based file-swapping networks on three campuses, and has consistently highlighted lawsuits at colleges as part of its larger campaign against music traders.
Record labels also have given discounts to authorized services such as Napster, RealNetworks' Rhapsody, Cdigix and Ruckus to offer cheap, legal music subscriptions on campus, hoping to attract students away from peer-to-peer networks.
i2hub had taken advantage of a feature in universities that let student transmissions--e-mail, Web surfing or peer to peer--default to Internet2 if both sides of a connection were connected to that network. Thus, two students at Internet2 universities who wanted to trade files would automatically see their traffic flow over the fast network, instead of the ordinary Internet.
That has meant that songs and videos could be downloaded extraordinarily quickly--just minutes for a full-length movie, and 20 seconds for an average song, assuming perfect conditions.
