In the last 10 days, universities around the country have seen more than a 20-fold increase in the number of filesharing takedown notices from the recording industry, in an unexplained spike that seems focused on colleges in the Midwest.

The spike is not matched by an increase in actual file sharing.

"Universities are getting as many notices from the RIAA in one day as what they would typically get from all content owners in a month," says Mark Luker, a vice president of higher education technology advocate Educause.

Indiana University says that starting on April 21, the Recording Industry Association of America began sending 80 legal notices a day to the university, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Typically, the university handles less than 100 such notices a month from the RIAA, the Motion

Picture Association of America and HBO combined.

The DMCA notices include information about a specific IP address, file sharing protocol and named infringing file.

Indiana University's tech staff routinely compare those details against the university's logs to make sure that the allegations are accurate, according to Mark Bruhn, an associate vice president of IU's information technology department.

But many of the recent notices don't correspond to entries in traffic logs, which also don't show any overall increase in file sharing, Bruhn said.

"We are not sure now what we have is an allegation of copyright infringement or an allegation of possible future illegal behavior," Bruhn said."The whole thing is very concerning, to be frank. We don't know why they are doing this and I'm not sure they know what they are doing."

"They in fact can't know if the files being offered are actually the protected works of their clients – how would they know if they didn't download and open them?" Bruhn said.

University of Chicago has also seen a recent surge, its CIO confirmed to THREAT LEVEL.

Meanwhile, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported Wednesday that

George Washington University and University of Cincinnati are also reporting spikes beginning two weeks ago.

For its part, the RIAA denies there's anything new to the letters, sending along a stock statement to THREAT LEVEL.

"We are always making an effort to more effectively and efficiently detect infringing activity on the Internet, as we are continuously looking for ways to improve our ability to find and act on incidences of theft online. Having said that, there's been no change in our procedures."

RIAA spokeswoman Liz Kennedy did not respond to a follow-up request to explain the surge , and IU's analysis that notices were being sent without proof of infringement.

Luker finds the RIAA's position difficult to believe.

"It is for us hard to accept that students are multiplying their infringements by 30," Luker said.

Bruhn concurs.

"The RIAA says it is not new, but clearly it is," Bruhn said.

University of California at Berkeley's chief information officer Shel

Waggener confirmed he'd heard of the spikes and suggested there was a political purpose driving them.

"Public universities are in a unique position since the industry puts pressure on us through state legislatures to try to impose what are widely considered to be draconian content monitoring measures and turn us into tech police forces in support of a specific industry," Waggener said.

The RIAA is also backing legislation in states such as Illinois and Tennessee that would require schools that get a certain number of notices to begin installing deep packet monitoring equipment on their internet and intranets, according to Luker.

"The number of DMCA notices that are sent to a university vary wildly from one day to the next, and no one, including the federal government knows how they send them out or what criteria they use," Luker said. "It is not reasonable in any way to use those counts as a basis for government actions."

IU's Bruhn says the school has typically treated the notices seriously, requiring first time offenders to take an online tutorial about copyright, suspending second time offenders from the university's net for two weeks and indefinitely suspending anyone caught a third time.

Bruhn, Waggener and Luker all downplayed the amount of file sharing occurring on campus networks these days, saying that the MPAA, for instance, radically overestimated how much movie piracy was attributable to college students. For more than two years, the industry claimed that more than 40 percent of illegal movie downloads came from college students – costing the industry billions of dollars. Then in January of this year, the estimate was reduced to 15% for college-aged students, and only 3% occurring on campus networks.

Photo: Flyer handed out to Texas Tech students in 2006, Credit: Wesley Fryer

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