UNIVERSITY CAMPUSES throughout the United States, and in the Mid West in particular, are reporting huge increases in the number of legal letters sent by music industry pitbulls, despite no measurable increase in downloading activity.

Wired is reporting that some colleges are getting as many notices in one day as they would normally expect in a month.

Indiana University was receiving 80 notices a day from the RIAA last month when it usually gets less than 100 a month from all of the major copyright cops combined.

The move could just be something to do with RIAA-supported legislation which wants organisations to be forced to install deep-packet monitoring equipment if they receive a certain number of notices.

An RIAA spokeshound said "We are always making an effort to more effectively and efficiently detect infringing activity on the Internet, as we are continuously looking for ways to improve our ability to find and act on incidences of theft online. Having said that, there's been no change in our procedures."

The music industry once claimed that more than 40 per cent of illegal downloads came from college students. The estimate was recently reduced to 15 percent for college-aged students of which only three per cent was carried out on college kit. µ