The recording industry announced a new round of lawsuits Tuesday against 532 people accused of illegal file-sharing that includes students at Georgetown and 20 other universities.

“College campuses have been a very attractive place for file-sharing because of free and unlimited bandwidth,” said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, which filed the suits on behalf of record companies.

All 532 defendants are listed as “John Doe” in the lawsuits, a strategy used by the RIAA after a court found that lawsuits had to be filed individually. The RIAA can discover the identity of the defendants by linking the Internet protocol addresses to the defendants and then issuing subpoenas to universities and Internet service providers.

This is the not first time that a Georgetown student has been faced with an RIAA lawsuit.

Georgetown University officials said they have not received any subpoenas yet but that they have been notified about three pending subpoenas against university students.

“We will evaluate any subpoena when [or] if we get it to determine the appropriate course of action consistent with our legal obligations,” Julie Green Bataille, assistant vice president for communications, said.

The industry association used the John Doe lawsuits against 89 students using university networks, including the three students at Georgetown.

“We’re not targeting specific schools. We’re filing cases in different jurisdictions around the country in a way that maximizes the efficiency of the litigation process,” Sherman said.

Sherman said that the students targeted by the RIAA were chosen for the “egregiousness of their infringing activity.”

“The greater the number of copyrighted music files offered for others to copy, the greater the likelihood that you will be a target of litigations,” he added.

College students were among the first to take advantage of high-speed university Ethernet connections when Napster first offered free mp3 file-sharing in 1999. Legal action forced Napster to close in 2001 but the service was sold and was reintroduced as a music subscription service last year.

Fee-based downloading networks have expanded rapidly over the past year. Services such as Apple Inc.’s iTunes service has sold over 50 million songs at 99 cents each.

But networks such as Kazaa that allow free, illegal downloads are difficult to shut down and remain popular on campuses.

Students remained unfazed by the RIAA’s most recent statements.

“I think people will still download whether it’s from Kazaa or if they find another source,” Pia Shivdasani (COL ’07) said. “I don’t think prosecuting is the most effective way to end the problem. I think a solution needs to be reached that both the music industry and the public can be happy with.”

The RIAA estimates that over 2.6 billion songs are illegally downloaded every month.

As a result, Sherman said, record companies have lost one-third of their sales in just three years.

“Record stores were closing by the thousands and stores near college campuses were especially hard hit,” he said. “Thousands of label employees lost their jobs. Artist signings plummeted. And songwriter royalties were half of what they had been.”

Students are for the most part unsympathetic, however, to the music industries self-proclaimed plight. Tom Armstrong (COL ’07) said that the music industry needs to alter its practices if it wants to reduce downloading.

“I think if the recording industry wants to boost sales they need to stop going for college students and start dedicating their resources to producing better music,” he said. “People aren’t willing to pay $16 for a CD with two good tracks on it.”

The industry has also been sending warnings, or “takedown notices,” to universities, providing them with IP addresses of students who are in danger of being sued.

In cases where the university was able to identify a student based on the IP address given by the RIAA, it sent the student a confidential notice of the possible impending subpoena, along with advice to seek independent legal counsel. Georgetown also reminded students of the terms of its Acceptable Use Policy, which states that “Georgetown University equipment and software may not be used to violate copyright or the terms of any license agreement.”

Sherman said that the lawsuits filed Tuesday were not related to the takedown notices and that lawsuits will target “more egregious infringers.”

Students who receive such notices can be liable for disciplinary action from the university.

To date, over 2,000 lawsuits have been filed by the industry association and over 400 have been settled, with an average settlement of $3,000. No cases have gone to trial.

Sherman warned that the lawsuits will continue despite the results of the current batch of lawsuits.

“We have precipitated a national conversation about the impact of illegal downloading, which wasn’t occurring before. People didn’t think twice about what they were doing. Now they are far more likely to at least think about the impact of their actions,” Sherman said. “That’s a major step forward.”

The RIAA continues to target students to send a message, not to raise revenue, Sherman added.

“So many college students are concerned about the aggregate impact of development in Brazil, or sulfur from power plants, because they recognize that the actions of one person contribute to a global problem with adverse global consequences,” he said. “It’s no different with respect to illegal file-sharing.”