When the Recording Industry Association of America sent its first batch of pre-litigation notices to 400 students accused of music piracy, at least 116 people took the trade group up on its offer to settle out of court. Students who didn’t settle within 20 days, meanwhile, were told that they would be sued under the industry’s time-honored “John Doe” subpoena process.
The trade group is already making good on that promise. As The Athens News and the Associated Press report, the RIAA has filed suit against the remaining song-swapping suspects. And the industry group has now sent the John Doe subpoenas, which order campus officials to name students identified only by their Internet-protocol numbers, to colleges like Ohio University and Vanderbilt University.
Some colleges have been hesitant to forward the pre-litigation notices on to their students, because those documents are not legally binding. But nearly all of those institutions will go ahead and respond to the subpoenas, as plenty of colleges have done in the past. —Brock Read
