The Michigan Daily

While the rest of campus worried about final exams and papers, 15 University students found out they might have to hand over a few thousand dollars for music they shared over the Internet.

The students received letters from the University that the Recording Industry Association of America believed they had engaged in file-sharing over the University's network. The notices sent were only a few of hundreds of copyright infringement notifications sent by the industry group to universities over the past two weeks.

Jack Bernard, the University's assistant general counsel who handles legal issues surrounding file-sharing, said in the last two weeks the University received more than 65 notices from the RIAA.

While most were "take down notices," which require the University to tell targeted network users to stop engaging in copyright infringement, 15 were "preservation notices," which require the University to maintain the logs that could identify potential copyright infringers. Preservation notices can lead to lawsuits or costly settlements for students.

Bernard said that while take down notices are common, until April the University hadn't received a single preservation notice from the RIAA this year. Overall it saw a decline in the number of notices in 2007, too, he said.

"For some reason that we don't know, the RIAA has escalated its efforts to issue take down notices and issue subpoenas in the last week or two," he said.

Bernard said that sending large numbers of notifications at the same time places a bigger burden on universities, but that he wasn't sure why the RIAA did this.

While the University has been taxed by the sudden increase in notifications, the number it has received is dwarfed by the number sent to other campuses.

Michigan State University received more than 1,000 notices over the past two weeks - the same number of notices the school received the entire 2005-2006 school year, said Randy Hall, who handles infringement complaints at MSU.

Steven L. Worona, director of policy and networking programs at EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit group focused on technology use in higher education, said that during the past two weeks universities nationwide were sent as many as 50 times the number of notices they usually receive over the same period.

But Worona warned against using the number of copyright infringement notices sent to universities as an indicator of the amount of illegal file-sharing happening on college campuses.

"We have no reason to believe and every reason to doubt that there's been an increase in infringing activity," he said. "All we know is that they have clearly made a major change in the way they are determining what infringements are taking place and what infringements they choose to send notices about."

RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth said in an e-mail interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education on Tuesday that the group has not changed its procedures for identifying copyright infringement. RIAA officials declined to comment further.

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