The recording and movie industry associations zeroed in on Internet2 this week, filing lawsuits against hundreds of students from 18 colleges across the country, alleging they illegally downloaded and swapped music and movie files using the high-speed network.The Recording Industry Association of America said it would sue more than 400 students, while the Motion Picture Association of America, declining to name the number of students it sued, confirmed the action.Calling the use of illegal file-sharing over Internet an epidemic, the RIAA said that a file-sharing application named “i2hub” has become the application of choice to download copyrighted material over Internt2. It allows users to download movies in less than five minutes and songs in less than 20 seconds. Students mistakenly believe their activities can’t be detected, the RIAA said. “This next generation of the Internet is an extraordinarily exciting tool for researchers, technologists and many others with valuable legitimate uses,” Cary Sherman, President of the RIAA, said in a statement. “Yet, we cannot let this high-speed network become a zone of lawlessness where the normal rules don’t apply. We have worked very constructively with the university community, improving educational efforts at colleges across the country, expanding partnerships be-tween schools and legal online services and providing a clearinghouse for exper-tise on technological anti-piracy solutions. We cannot let rampant illegal downloading on Internet2 jeopardize this collaborative work. By taking this initial action, we are putting students and administrators everywhere on notice that there are consequences for unlawful uses of this special network.” The lawsuits brought criticism from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which supports digital rights and some file-sharing practices. “We’ve heard from a lot of students concerned about whether they are going to be targeted and some who have been,” said Allison Navone, intake co-ordinator with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “With more than 60 million Americans using file sharing, lawsuits are not the answer. It’s time to get artists paid and make file sharing legal.” In addition to the 18 campuses whose students are being sued, the RIAA said it has evidence of i2hub infringement at another 140 schools in 41 states. While these schools were not included in the initial round of lawsuits, letters are being sent to each university president alerting them to the illegal activity occurring on their campuses. The RIAA asked university presidents to take action to stop illegal file sharing related to not only i2hub but also other university networks like the cen-tralized piracy servers often set up by students on the college’s local area network. The letter asks university leaders to explore technical measures such as filtering and consider legitimate alternatives to offer to students. The RIAA said a total of 405 lawsuits will be filed tomorrow against students at Boston University, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Drexel University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michigan State University, New York University, Ohio State University, Princeton University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology, University of California – Berkeley, University of California – San Diego, University of Massachusetts – Amherst, University of Pittsburgh and University of Southern California. Combined, the students being sued have illegally distributed more than 1.5 million total files, including more than 930,000 songs, the RIAA said. Technology Industry