StrangeSearch, Iowa State’s popular sharing server, has temporarily shut down due to developments in the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) battle against illegal file sharing.

Vic Vijayakumar, current administrator for StrangeSearch and online editor for the Daily, said StrangeSearch will be down until he has a chance to make modifications to the code to change the site to an opt-in system. By making StrangeSearch an opt-in system, users would be shielded from potential lawsuits by limiting access of outside users.

Vijayakumar said he has not changed the code yet. StrangeSearch has been down since June.

Ryan Grimm, senior in liberal studies, runs the Local Area Network Index Web site, LANDex.gotdns.org, another service that performs many of the same operations as StrangeSearch.

“I provide a tool that is useful to a lot of people,” Grimm said.

Grimm said he was not concerned about the recent lawsuits filed by the RIAA against students running file-sharing services.

“I don’t have a whole lot to hide,” he said. “I have no idea what the content is, [and] the index is publicly available.”

The recent activity has ISU officials worried about students.

“Students need to be aware that if they share or download copyrighted material they put themselves at legal risk,” said Bethany Schuttinga, interim assistant dean of students for judicial affairs.

Schuttinga said there were potentially large monetary consequences students could face.

In June, RIAA announced it would begin targeting and filing lawsuits against individual file sharers. The following month, the organization sent out subpoenas to Internet Service Providers before filing against users who were illegally sharing music over the Internet.

In response to this, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) set up a service on its Web site allowing users to find out if they were being targeted by the RIAA. Users can log onto the EFF Web site, www.eff.org, to find out if their username has been subpoenaed by the RIAA.

According to Wired News services, www.wired.com, last April the RIAA filed lawsuits against several students at universities across the nation who had set up network file-sharing services. Targeted universities included Michigan Technological University, Princeton and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. All the students settled out of court for costs ranging from $12,000 to $17,500. All l agreed to shut down their file-sharing services.

According to Daily staff reports, last January several students’ computers were seized by the ISU Police as part of an investigation into illegal sharing of copyrighted software, music and videos.

It is not known what the result of those investigations were. At the same time StrangeSearch was voluntarily shut down for two weeks.