Recording Industry goes after campus P2P networks: suit alleges $97.8 billion in damages. (In The News).

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued four college students in April, accusing them of operating Napster-like file-sharing services on their campuses. The students--Dan Peng of Princeton University (NJ), Jesse Jordan and Aaron Sherman of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (NY), and Joseph Nievelt of Michigan Technological University--are alleged to have traded copyrighted songs on peer-to-peer networks at their universities.

While no one expects the students to pay the $97.8 billion in damages alleged in the suit, the action sends a clear the message that illegal distribution of copyrighted material is not acceptable.

Michigan Technological University President Curtis J. Tompkins, responding to the suit in a letter posted at the school's Web site, points out that the school has always cooperated with efforts to educate students about copyright law, and disciplines students found violating the law. But this time, Tompkins says, the RIAA ignored protocol. "Had [the RIAA] followed the previous methods established in notification of a violation, we would have shut off the student and not allowed the problem to grow to the size and scope that it is today."

It's hard to know what the RIAA's motives are, says Tyler Ochoa, professor and co-director of the Center for Intellectual Property Law at Whittier Law School (CA). "The RIAA did something no one thought they'd do--go after individual users. This indicates to me that they are getting fairly desperate."

Some claim the students are simply indexing the names and locations of publicly shared files (and not hosting the files) and their services fall into a "safe harbor" area of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, much like a commercial search engine. But Ochoa says that argument won't work. To receive the DMCA Limitation of Liability the students would have to demonstrate that they are service providers who have a policy of removing infringing files, and of terminating repeat infringers. "There's simply no way they can do that," he says.

Asked whether the case would go to court or be settled, Ochoa offered a philosophical take: "If the RIAA wants to make an example of these four students to deter others from doing the same thing, what's their incentive to settle?"