The music industry's legal campaign against campus P2P activity marked its one-year anniversary in late February, and the RIAA is still at it. The group has sent off another 569 prelitigation settlement letters to students at 26 schools, only a couple of which have attempted to thwart the RIAA. One of those schools, Marshall, was told by a judge last week to cough up the names and addresses of seven "John Doe" students.

Marshall University was served a subpoena seeking the identities of seven students after the RIAA filed one of its usual John Doe lawsuits (Arista Records v. Does 1-7 if you're scoring at home... or if you're alone). The school resisted, arguing that the RIAA made false representations in order to obtain the subpoena and begin ex parte discovery, and also that the subpoena imposed an undue burden on the school.

Marshall said that four of the seven students lived in dorm rooms with at least one roommate. As a result, it would be unable to figure out who was using the PC flagged by MediaSentry without "the expense and inconvenience of an investigation." One of the others was using the school's wireless network, while the other two were in single-occupancy dorm rooms. Even then, Marshall pointed out that it could only furnish the names of the students, not identify the actual P2P users uncovered by MediaSentry.

The school's attorneys also argued that federal privacy laws prevented the disclosure of the students' identifying data and that the RIAA's subpoena was invalidated by the DMCA. Citing a decision in a similar lawsuit against students at the College of William and Mary, Marshall argued that the RIAA should be forced to follow the infringement notification provisions outlined by the DMCA.

The judge disagreed, saying that an amended subpoena asking only for "identifying information with respect to the person associated with the IP address at the date and time of the alleged infringing use" would alleviate any "undue burden" on Marshall. He also disagreed with Marshall's take on federal privacy law, but curiously failed to address the DMCA argument raised by the school.

In the Pacific Northwest, the University of Oregon has raised many of the same issues in its fight against the RIAA's attempts to learn the identities of 17 students. Oregon's Attorney General has been critical of the RIAA in court filings, and his office wants the chance to take its own look at the RIAA's investigative practices. The judge in that case has yet to rule on the University of Oregon's motion to quash.

So far, schools willing to stand up to what former EFF attorney Wendy Seltzer has described as the RIAA's "copyright bullying" are few and far between. Still, resistance from individual students and schools appears to have slowed the RIAA's legal campaign against college students.

Further reading