Hours after a federal court judge ordered Oklahoma State University to show cause why it shouldn't be held in contempt for failing to respond to an RIAA subpoena, attorneys for the school e-mailed a list of students' names to the RIAA's attorneys. But now that the RIAA has what it wanted, the group is unsure about how to go about sending out its prelitigation settlement letters. Some of the students are represented by an attorney, meaning that the RIAA is barred from contacting them directly.

The case in question involves 11 OSU students accused of using P2P networks to infringe on the Big Four labels' copyrights. The students have fought hard to keep their identities secret, filing motions to quash the subpoenas and later attacking the credibility of the RIAA's expert witness. The judge denied the motion to quash the RIAA's subpoenas in November, ordering OSU to provide the identities of the students it believed were behind the IP addresses flagged by MediaSentry.

That's where things got a little bit sticky. In a filing on Monday, the RIAA noted that OSU said it would provide the info in late November. Further requests by the plaintiffs' attorneys in December, January, and "several times" already this month went unanswered, with one exception. On February 1, the university sent the RIAA's attorneys an e-mail that referenced an attachment containing the data sought by the labels, but the attachment wasn't actually attached.

The RIAA's normal course of action upon getting a school to cough up data on its students is to send them prelitigation settlement letters offering them the chance to avoid a lawsuit by means of a four-figure payment. Some of the OSU Does have hired an attorney, however, which makes sending out settlement letters difficult. "[A]t this time, Plaintiffs are simply unable to determine which of the Doe defendants are represented by an attorney without breaking the prohibition [against contacting represented defendants directly]," notes the RIAA in a filing. The attorney in question, Marilyn Barringer-Thompson, has so far refused to identify her clients either by name or IP address.

If that name sounds familiar, it may be because she represented Debbie Foster, one of the first defendants to triumph over the RIAA and win attorneys' fees. Barringer-Thompson has a history of aggressively litigating file-sharing cases brought by the music industry, and the RIAA looks like it's facing an another protracted and potentially costly fight here as well.

If nothing else, the OSU case serves as a reminder of the obstacles the RIAA has faced in its nearly-one-year-old legal campaign against college students. The labels have seen the Oregon Attorney General criticize their conduct in a case involving 17 University of Oregon students. In another case involving seven students at the College of William & Mary, a federal judge barred the RIAA from doing its usual end run around the legal system; seven months later the RIAA still doesn't know the identities of the students.

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