Last month, the RIAA announced that it was putting an end to its reviled legal campaign against P2P users and would not be filing any new cases, moving instead towards a graduated response plan. There are a number of cases still in the pipeline, however, some of which have been slowly chugging along towards a conclusion of one sort or another. But it appears that lawsuits directed at college students are quickly wrapping up, as the RIAA has dropped at least three John Doe cases in the past week.

The cases in question involve students at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, North Carolina State, Rhode Island College, and the University of Michigan. In each instance, the RIAA had filed its customary John Doe lawsuits seeking ex parte subpoenas, forcing the schools to turn over the names and addresses of the students using IP addresses flagged by ex-investigator MediaSentry.

In each case, the RIAA has voluntarily dismissed the cases without prejudice, meaning that the anonymous students could be sued if the labels were to have another change of heart. But given that the RIAA is moving away from the litigation strategy that it has pursued for over five years, it's likely that the students' identities will never be known to the industry group.

Of the 14 students in North Carolina, two settled with the RIAA, presumably after receiving prelitigation settlement letters. The 22 students at Rhode Island College may have been saved by the actions of the school's ISP, Apogee Telecom, according to Ray Beckerman. He points out that Apogee filed a motion objecting to the RIAA's subpoena seeking identifying data on the students. Seven students at the University of Michigan are also off the hook.

As we've pointed out on numerous occasions, the RIAA's campaign against college students has not gone as smoothly as the rest of the 30,000 or so lawsuits filed by the group. Both students and colleges have appeared to be more inclined to challenge the record labels in court, with varying degrees of success.

Faced with opposition by the students in North Carolina, the ISP for Rhode Island College, and a ruckus surrounding MediaSentry's legal status as a private investigator in the state of Michigan, the RIAA looks to have thrown in the towel rather than deciding to fork out more money for legal fees and court costs—arguably a wise decision given both its stated commitment to dropping the legal campaign and the tight economic climate.

With these and other cases being wrapped up, there are only a couple of high-profile remnants of the industry's war against P2P users left on the agenda. One is the scheduled retrial of Jammie Thomas later this year; the other is the case against Joel Tenenbaum, who is being represented by Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson and a host of students. The RIAA feels confident about the evidence it has in the Thomas case and its chances for a victory in a second trial, but whether it has the stomach to actually go through with it remains to be seen. The Tenenbaum case is shaping up to be another PR nightmare with the RIAA, as Nesson recently convinced the presiding judge to stream the court proceedings online, a decision the RIAA is anxious to see overturned.