17 University of Oregon students accused of file-sharing by the RIAA have received support from the university and the Oregon Attorney General's office. The university, represented by the state AG's office, has asked a federal judge to quash the RIAA's ex parte subpoena seeking the names of 17 Does flagged by the RIAA's investigator, SafeNet. All 17 of the IP addresses in question resolved to the University of Oregon, and, after pre-settlement litigation letters went undelivered, the record labels quickly filed a lawsuit in an attempt to obtain identifying information of those flagged by SafeNet.

The University has a number of objections to the RIAA's subpoena. First and foremost, it says it cannot identify 16 of the 17 students in question. Dale Smith, director of network services for the university, testified in an affidavit that it would not be possible to finger the students in question without conducting interviews or doing forensic investigations. Five of the 17 students in question accessed the P2P network from a double-occupancy dorm room, two of them from a single-occupancy room, and nine from the university's wireless network.

For the dorm rooms, Smith says it's impossible to determine if one of the students living there accessed the P2P network—or if it was a guest. The Does using the wireless network all logged on with a username, but Smith testifies that he can't determine "whether the content was accessed by the individual assigned that user name or by someone else using the computer associated with the user name."

The AG's office has some severe criticism of the RIAA's tactics in the memorandum supporting the motion to quash the subpoena. Before the lawsuit was filed, deputy attorney general Randolph Geller spoke to RIAA counsel Katheryn Coggon and assured her that the school would preserve all the relevant data. Despite that, the RIAA told the court that there was a "very real danger the ISP will not long preserve" the data it wanted. The AG points out that the RIAA neglected to tell the court that the school had already guaranteed that the evidence would be kept as long as necessary.

The school also says that the subpoena would put an undue burden on it, given the amount of effort required to discern the identities of those flagged by SafeNet. "In short, the subpoena requires the University to create discoverable material to assist Plaintiffs in their litigation rather than merely disclose existing documents," argues the school, citing case law that indicates that non-parties "are not required to create documents that do not exist, simply for the purposes of discovery."

As has happened in a couple of other cases, the university accuses the RIAA of using the wrong law as the basis for its subpoena. The RIAA's subpoena is "invalidated" by the DMCA, which the school argues should have been used by the record labels to discover the identities of the students in question. It's the same argument used successfully in a case involving students at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, where the judge quashed the RIAA's subpoenas for exactly that reason.

There's more, but the gist is the same: the school has no hope of identifying the students in question without engaging in some serious investigation of its own, it shouldn't be forced to do so, and the RIAA is using the wrong law as the basis for seeking the info in the first place.

We've pointed out previously that the RIAA has traveled a bumpy road in its legal efforts to battle on-campus file sharing, and this case is shaping up to be even more arduous for the labels than other cases involving schools as ISPs. As copyright attorney Ray Beckerman pointed out, this appears to the first time that a university has taken to heart the exhortations of former EFF staff attorney Wendy Stetzer to resist "copyright bullies," and directly fought the RIAA's subpoenas. If the judge sides with the University of Oregon on this issue, the RIAA will face a long, uphill battle to get the information it needs to continue its efforts to unmask the 17 students in question.