RIAA Pursues Internet2 Infringers with 9900th Lawsuit

According to their press release, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed 405 new copyright infringement lawsuits against students at 18 different colleges across the country on April 18, 2005 "in response to an emerging epidemic of music theft on a specialized, high-speed university computer network known as Internet2."

Internet2 is an advanced network created by participating colleges and universities for important academic research. Through the use of a file-sharing application known as “i2hub,� however, Internet2 is increasingly becoming the network of choice for students seeking to steal copyrighted songs and other works on a massive scale. Downloading from i2hub via Internet2 is extremely fast -- in most cases, less than five minutes for a movie or less than 20 seconds for a song. Students reportedly find i2hub especially appealing because they mistakenly believe their illegal file-sharing activities can’t be detected in the closed environment of the Internet2 network.

IFPI also filed new cases against 963 individuals in 11 countries across Europe and Asia on April 12. This brings the total number of these copyright lawsuits to 11,552 including 9,900 cases that have been brought to date in the US.

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