The Recording Industry Association of America — the group responsible for the production and distribution of 90 percent of the legal music in the United States — will again ratchet up its presence on many college campuses. The RIAA announced this week that it would be filing copyright infringement violations against 405 students from 18 campuses across the country.

There are currently no University students among those that will be facing charges.

The target of this slew of lawsuits is the Internet2 application i2hub. Internet2 is a high-speed network on campuses across the nation, including the University, where it was originally developed.

Unlike most file-sharing applications, not all students are able to utilize i2hub and Internet2. Some of the specifications for use are “at least 10M bps switched access to a 100M bps departmental network,” the network must support multicast services and “workstations must be able to sustain high bandwidth applications” according to the University’s Internet2 site.

Internet2 is currently being utilized on campus primarily for research. Alex Ade — who worked on the Visible Human Project — said that he had not heard of illegal file sharing across the network. He said VHS consists of staff and researchers who have little interaction with the student body on the network.

i2hub — a program much like Napster that runs exclusively on Internet2 — makes sending and receiving files on the high-speed network easy and efficient. The peer-to-peer application is easily downloadable and usable by anyone with Internet2. “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,” according to the RIAA’s official press release.

RIAA President Cary Sherman said these lawsuits aren’t simply a witch-hunt. “Internet2 is an amazing network that holds great promise. We can’t let it be hijacked for illegal purposes from the outset,” he said.

Although Sherman stressed that “college students are not the primary target,” he added that the RIAA has identified students at 140 unnamed universities across the nation for possible future litigation. For the time being, they are opting to only prosecute 25 students from each university.

“Today’s lawsuits are different in that we focused on i2hub, which is uniquely available on college campuses. Hence the focus on students in this round only,” Sherman added during an online interview.

The RIAA plans to send notices and warnings to the presidents of the identified schools. Sherman said he hopes that these messages and cautionary announcements from the university heads will stifle the growth of Internet file-sharing. He implied that the copyright infringements that are not currently being pursued may be dropped if users cease downloading files. “Chances are we will not take further action against these particular infringements, but we’re reserving the right to do so. In any event, we will certainly take action against future infringements,” Sherman said.

According to Sherman, the lawsuits are warranted. “We chose targets based on the egregiousness of the infringement. There was one user who was offering 13,600 MP3 files … similarly, where we had a large number of infringements at a school, the students at that school were more likely to be targeted.”

The indicted offenders are faced with a possible penalty of at least $750 per file. For frequent downloaders, this charge would cost a substantial amount of money. But Sherman also said most of these violations are settled for a much smaller amount, “on average in the $3,500 to 4,500 range.”

For now, the only solution the RIAA deems possible — aside from these lawsuits — is a contract between legal downloading sites and universities.

“So far, 44 schools have done deals with legitimate online music services so they can offer their students a legal way to get music. Some students have complained that their tuition or student fees shouldn’t be used for music. Yet virtually every school provides cable TV service in their dorms,” Sherman said.

University spokeswoman Julie Peterson could not be reached for comment.

The RIAA is not against online music distribution, Sherman added: “I think digital distribution of music is just beginning, and it’s going to get a whole lot larger than it is right now … but I think users are going to really gravitate toward subscription services as they learn more about them.”