If students are not already wary of the repercussions of illegal file-sharing, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is pushing its point with a new wave of lawsuits.
Filed on Wednesday, the latest flurry of legal activity targets four unidentified students on Penn's network -- less than a month after four other Penn students were sued.
Out of the 745 lawsuits filed against unidentified users based on their IP addresses, 75 were users of university networks at 17 colleges including Columbia, Harvard, Princeton and New York Universities.
This is the fourth time this year that the RIAA has targeted users on university networks. Since March 2004, when the RIAA began suing users on college networks, more than a thousand students have faced litigation.
Though a recent report submitted to Congress by the Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities cites that these lawsuits "have enabled legitimate online services to take root," there are still mixed reviews as to the effectiveness of such legal action.
Law professor Polk Wagner called the RIAA's barrage of lawsuits a "strategy to attract attention to the issues of file-sharing."
He said that he was unconvinced that this strategy would bring long-term effects.
The RIAA "will not be able to litigate their way out of this," he added, saying that lawsuits are not the way to combat such technically complex issues.
Despite such criticisms, the RIAA is resolute on its strategy.
"Theft is theft and should be treated as such," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement. "When college students illegally download, they ... put themselves at risk for lawsuits."
However, the RIAA is taking other measures to encourage legal practices through various educational campaigns such as the "Download" campaign in the Billboard Magazine.
According to RIAA spokesperson Amanda Hunter, independent studies have pointed toward a substantial growth in the number of downloaders using legal services.
"We do not expect to completely eradicate online piracy, but in order for legitimate online music to reach its potential, the playing field must be level," she said.
However, Wagner believes that the RIAA should concentrate more on educating people about the legal downloading services available online. The lawsuits may be just a temporary solution to "slow things down while they take other steps. ... What we are seeing might be an interim measure."
The RIAA has to send out a more useful message than the "punitive messages the lawsuits give," he added.
