The Recording Industry Association of America sent another wave of pre-litigation letters to colleges earlier this month, though Penn did not receive any letters in this round.
The RIAA sent 407 pre-litigation settlement letters to students at 18 universities nationwide, continuing its strategy of primarily targeting college students.
Harvard University - where professors have vocally criticized the RIAA's methods - still has not been asked by the association to forward letters to its students.
The RIAA targets students it believes are guilty of copyright infringement by monitoring file-sharing sites and tracking downloads to individual IP addresses.
The RIAA then requests that universities forward notifications of copyright infringement to the corresponding network users, a request with which Penn - but not all colleges - complies.
According to an RIAA spokeswoman, 64 Penn students have received pre-litigation letters from the RIAA asking them to either pay a fee between $3,000 and $4,000 and "pre-settle" or face a federal lawsuit for copyright infringement.
Of the 64 students, the RIAA has reached settlements with 26 individuals. The remainder of the cases are still pending.
Penn students have received notification letters in three waves since the RIAA launched its initiative against college campuses in late February 2007. Last year, 17 Penn students received letters in April, 31 in September and 16 in November.
Unlike Penn, some universities have chosen not to comply with RIAA requests.
The University of Oregon, backed by Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers, recently filed a motion to contest the legitimacy of a subpoena issued by the RIAA demanding that the University identify 17 network users accused of sharing copyrighted music.
Several Harvard Law School professors have also spoken out against the RIAA's methods of reaching students, and because the RIAA knows Harvard will fight its requests, attorney Ray Beckerman said, they have not sent pre-litigation letters to students at the university.
"[The RIAA] will lose," Beckerman said. "They have no factual basis for it. Harvard is going to fight them - law professors have publicly said that they will fight.
As the trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry, the RIAA has now issued 12 waves of pre-litigation letters to universities.
According to the market research firm NPD, in 2006, college students accounted for more than 1.3 billion illegal music downloads, representing 26 percent of all illegal music downloading on P2P networks.
