In a new wave of action against users who illegally swap music on the Internet, the Recording Industry Association of America today plans to sue 405 college students across the country, including 25 from Carnegie Mellon University and 16 from the University of Pittsburgh, for copyright infringement.

The RIAA, which represents the major record labels, is targeting those who share music files on i2hub, a 1-year-old peer-to-peer trading service used primarily on Internet2, a superfast network that was created by universities for academic research, but is generally unavailable to the public.

Internet2 allows users to download files at a speed of less than 20 seconds for a song -- about five to 10 times faster than most services -- and five minutes for a movie, which normally can take an hour or two.

In a teleconference yesterday, Cary Sherman, RIAA president, said that while Internet2, which is at the fingertips of several million students, researchers and professionals around the world, "is paving the way for a global academic community ... it has been hijacked for illegal purposes."

Sherman further said that "students find i2hub especially appealing because they mistakenly believe their illegal file-sharing activities are in the closed environment of the Internet2 network. As a result, we've seen an enormous increase in the amount of illegal file-sharing occurring on college networks."

Today, the RIAA will issue subpoenas to Carnegie Mellon and Pitt to reveal the names of the students based on their Internet accounts. It will then file federal lawsuits against those students for copyright infringement.

Joel M. Smith, chief information officer, who oversees central computing at Carnegie Mellon, said yesterday the university is required by law to turn those names over to the RIAA.

He added, "We do not approve of anyone engaged in violation of copyright law. We spend a good deal of effort in educating our students about copyright law and the consequences and ethics of violating it. We teach an entire section of that in a course that every student is required to take."

Sherman said this initial round of lawsuits targets "the most egregious users" of i2hub, adding that the RIAA limited the number of students to no more than 25 per university. Students at 18 schools are targeted.

The average number of files shared by users in this round is more than 2,300 -- the equivalent of more than 175 CDs -- with some users sharing as many as 13,600 mp3, or music, files and 72,700 total files, including audio, software and video. Combined, the 405 students have illegally distributed more than 930,000 songs, the RIAA said.

Sherman said the RIAA has evidence of illegal file-sharing at 140 more schools in 41 states and has sent warning letters to university presidents, who he claimed had access to filters and other methods available to control the downloading.

"The universities have been responsive to doing so in the past when they've learned about these problems," he said. "We would hope they would be a little more pro-active in identifying these problems and helping us to avoid filing the kinds of lawsuits we are filing today."

At Carnegie Mellon, Smith said, a few students a month have temporarily lost Internet access because of cease-and-desist orders from the RIAA.

As for the university monitoring students on its own, he said, "it's actually difficult to do. At Carnegie Mellon, it's against our policy to look at the content on the network, except in cases of security threats to the network.

"Secondly, even if you were to look at content, it doesn't really label itself as a legal download from iTunes, as opposed to an illegal copyright violation."

After years of targeting services such as Napster, which is now legitimate, and Grokster, the RIAA began suing individual users two years ago to create a chilling effect about illegal downloading. To date, more than 9,000 users have been sued. Many have settled their lawsuits by paying penalties of $2,500 to $10,000.

Adam Eisgrau, of the Washington-based P2P United, which represents file-sharing services, condemned the lawsuits, saying that the artists are not getting that money and that a larger solution -- such as levies on computers, discs and Internet services -- is needed.

"The people who are bringing these suits are within their rights, but they're wrong," Eisgrau said. "They're wrong as a practical matter and as a matter of fundamental fairness, because these industries know darn well that collecting several thousand dollars from a student isn't going to bear any relationship at all with solving the larger commercial and policy issues.

"The pipe will only get bigger, and what's needed is not lawsuits against individuals -- though they have some educational value. What's needed is a much more creative and comprehensive solution that allows people entitled to royalties to get them."

Sherman said the RIAA was aware of the creators behind i2hub, but hasn't taken action against them. The Motion Picture Association of America also is expected to file federal copyright lawsuits against students today.

The other colleges are Boston 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 at Berkeley, University of California at San Diego, University of Massachusetts at Amherst and University of Southern California.