Ever since Napster made its way into the mainstream, the recording industry has been on a mission to put a stop to what has now been reduced to a buzz word – Internet piracy.

After a U.S. Appeals Court ruling required Internet service providers to identify subscribers suspected of illegally sharing music files, the Recording Industry Association of America said that it would begin searching file-sharing networks to identify music fans who offer large collections of MP3 files for downloading.

Before the end of the month, the RIAA expects to file several hundred copyright lawsuits seeking financial damages.

By swapping files they might otherwise have purchased, users have been getting something for nothing, the RIAA is within bounds for the suits being filed. This swapping practice deprives the music labels, songwriters and musicians of the financial benefits they have come to expect.

“With peer-to-peer file sharing, two people are breaking the law,” said Walter Czerniak, associate vice president of Information Technology Services. “One is making copyrighted material available for the public, and the other is simply taking it for free.”

Czerniak said NIU acts as an ISP to the students in the residence halls, computer labs and to employees.

“Sniffers on the Internet see a PC on NIU’s campus downloading music illegally, and then issue a subpoena to the university,” Czerniak said. “If served with a subpoena, NIU would have to relinquish the name of the student.”

According to ITS, NIU takes precautions to limit the amount of downloading on campus by putting traffic limiters to lessen file-sharing, and to give priority to those just using the Internet for informational purposes.

For example, a person can only download so much without taking away from someone else using the Internet.

“We get complaints from the MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America] and RIAA almost every day,” Czerniak said. “Since they’re not subpoenas, we just call the student, let them know that we’ve received a complaint, and typically the student pleads with some ignorance and says that it will stop. We don’t want our NIU students to be the bench-mark for this new round of legal action.”

So far, no student at NIU has been issued a subpeona.

Students on campus have mixed opinions on the notion of being sued for downloading music.

“This is just the way technology is going right now,” said senior psychology major Brenda Powell. “It’s the 21st century, and if the recording industry tries to stop it, someone else is just going to find some other way around the current process.”

Sophomore communication major Cole Gardner takes the threat a little more seriously.

“I’ve got close to a thousand songs on my computer, half of which I’ve downloaded since being at the dorms,” Gardner said. “It seems so harmless, I don’t think of it as stealing, or an illegal activity at all. I just think that I’m borrowing music from a stranger.”

Seeing as the proverbial cat is long out of the bag, the industry doesn’t expect to eliminate music downloads all together.

Napster is planning to return as a paid subscription site, and services like Pressplay.com and Apple’s new iTunes music store now offer users MP3s for a fee. In its first month, iTunes sold three million songs – one million in the first week alone.