Students Targeted in Piracy Lawsuits

The major Hollywood studios and record companies have a new lesson for college students: The faster you download movies and music, the sooner you may end up in a courtroom.

Leaders of the Recording Industry Assn. of America and the Motion Picture Assn. of America said Tuesday that they expected to file hundreds of lawsuits today against students across the country who use a super-fast version of the Internet that connects more than 300 universities and other institutions.

Among those facing copyright infringement lawsuits are 25 people at USC and an unspecified number at UC San Diego and UC Berkeley.

Because the studios and labels don’t know the alleged pirates’ identities, the RIAA and the MPAA plan to sue them as “John Does” and seek their names through college Internet records. They face penalties of up to $150,000 per song or movie copied.

The targets are users of software called i2hub, which enables files to be copied in a fraction of the time required by other file-sharing programs. I2hub users on different campuses typically connect to each other through Internet2, an accelerated network unavailable to the general public.

Although speeds vary on Internet2, researchers once downloaded an entire DVD-quality movie in 30 seconds -- a task that could take more than six hours over a high-speed phone line.

“Our goal with these suits is an educational effort, to get students to stop stealing copyrighted movies,” said Kori Bernards, a spokeswoman for the MPAA.

The record companies planned to sue 405 people at 18 campuses who the labels said were sharing an average of more than 2,300 copyrighted songs. The MPAA said it planned to sue students at UC San Diego and six other universities, but wouldn’t specify how many.

The RIAA said its suits would address a small slice of the piracy by i2hub users. Its researchers claim to have found evidence of infringements at 140 additional universities in 41 states, and the group has sent warning letters to university presidents.

The music and movie trade associations moved with unusual speed against i2hub users, filing suits a little more than a year after the program made its debut. By contrast, the record companies did not sue users of conventional file-sharing programs until September 2003, four years after the pioneering Napster file-sharing network launched. The movie studios waited an additional year before filing their first lawsuits against individuals.

The i2hub program is the brainchild of Wayne Chang, a student at the University of Massachusetts who is on leave.

Three file-sharing experts said the program provided a centralized directory that leads users to files stored on other users’ computers.

But in an e-mail Chang said, “We don’t keep an index of files whatsoever.”

“The i2hub Organization does not condone activities and actions that breach the rights of copyright owners,” Chang said in a news release. But he added in an e-mail, “Lawsuits are never a good thing.”

The program is reminiscent of the original Napster, which Chang played a minor volunteer role in while he was a high school student. Among other contributions, Chang developed a way for users to circumvent the anti-piracy filters Napster added under a federal judge’s order.

An Internet2 executive, Laurie Burns, said i2hub “is not something we consider to be part of the Internet2 environment.” She added that copyright infringement was expressly forbidden under Internet2’s terms of use but that group relied on universities to police their own users.

Sheldon Steinbach of the American Council on Education, a higher-education trade group, said universities had been working with the entertainment industry in recent years to deter piracy on campus and develop legitimate alternatives to illegal downloading.

Nevertheless, he said, the new round of lawsuits reflected the industry’s need to “keep the issue of CD and motion-picture piracy alive in the public’s mind.”

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Times staff writer Joseph Menn contributed to this report.