LEWISTON – Bates College may soon face a subpoena demanding the names of students who are sharing music files illegally on the Internet.

A 20-day record industry deadline ends Tuesday.

The five students targeted in pre-lawsuit letters by the Recording Industry Association of America, who have been alerted by the school, have until tomorrow’s deadline to either settle up with the organization or face being sued and slapped with a penalty of $750 or higher for each pirated song.

If there are hold-outs, school officials will face a decision to either supply the names or face a lawsuit of their own.

“We will decide what to do when the time comes,” said Gene Wiemers, Bates’ vice president for information and library services.

It’s a decision that may be faced by private Internet providers across the country.

Though the tactic of issuing pre-litigation letters has so far been confined to colleges and universities – 1,218 letters to students at 58 schools – the RIAA has not ruled out sending them to other Internet service providers.

“We’re not different from Verizon or Adelphia or any Internet provider,” Wiemers said.

Like the school, the companies routinely receive e-mailed warnings from record sellers, movie studios and even pornographers upset that someone connected to their system is illegally sharing audio or video files.

Most private companies throw them away.

The Sun Journal called several local and national Internet companies to inquire about their policies in handling such warnings. Few returned phone calls. All declined to be interviewed on the record.

However, an attorney for one provider expressed frustration with the recording industry’s assertion that Internet companies must police their traffic.

It would be like penalizing the phone company when someone makes crank calls. Tracing all the people who illegally share Internet files would be too time consuming and costly to attempt.

One by one, however, the pirates can be located.

The pre-lawsuit letters and the more prevalent warnings both trace people with two pieces of information: an IP address and a time.

Whenever people log onto the Internet, they are assigned an IP address, a simple group of numbers that identifies the Internet provider.

Combine those numbers with a time, and a provider’s logs can usually identify a specific user.

Cross-referencing those numbers is not easy, though.

It typically takes several minutes to pour through lists to find a match, Wiemers said.

Privacy on the ‘Net is something which Wiemers has been talking about since the pre-lawsuit letters were issued.

“I regard this as an opportunity,” he said. “Our job is education. I’m not walking away from our role here.”

“People think they are anonymous or that they are private on the Internet,” Wiemers said. “They are not.”

Outside of the school, the issue has been challenged again and again.

In 2004, Verizon fought the record industry all the way to the Supreme Court. The company objected to the RIAA’s demands to release names of alleged pirates

The Supreme Court declined to hear the case, upholding a Court of Appeals decision that only a subpoena can force a company to release the information.

Meanwhile, the warnings from music companies and movie studios keep arriving.

In many cases, they’re computer-generated and surprisingly quick.

Unlike the private companies, Bates passes on such warnings to students. Those who receive more than one are typically unplugged from the network.

Wiemers shared a recent example in which the industry association found that a Bates student had been sharing two particular music files at 10:05 p.m. one night and at 10:36 a.m. the following day. By that next evening at 7:53 p.m., an e-mail about the alleged acts of piracy had been sent to Wiemers.

“It’s all done by machines,” Wiemers said. “The recording industry has some pretty good technologists.”