* SAN JOSE, Calif. – The recording industry filed copyright infringement lawsuits Thursday against four college students, accusing them of setting up Napster-like file-swapping services on their campus networks.
The civil suits claim the students exploited academic resources to illicitly trade as many as a million songs without permission from record labels or artists. Then, they publicly bragged about their exploits.
“This is a particularly flagrant way to illegally distribute millions of copyrighted works over the Internet,” said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, the industry’s trade association.
The recording industry telegraphed its campus crackdown last October putting 2,300 university administrators on notice to curb student behavior – or face legal consequences.
The suits seek not merely to halt the illegal music trading, but to slap each student with a maximum penalty of $150,000 per song.
The RIAA charges that each student, in a calculated attempt to evade university restrictions on illegal music copying, used software known as Flatlan, Phynd or Direct Connect, to create their own underground file-swapping services on their campus networks.

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