As they descend upon college campuses in coming weeks, millions of music-loving students could find themselves confronting an unprecedented legal assault by the recording industry against online piracy.

The Recording Industry Association of America has pledged to file lawsuits as soon as September against people it alleges illegally share copyrighted songs on the Internet.

College campuses -- where peer-to-peer file-sharing and downloading of copyrighted music, movies, video games and software off the Internet are a part of dormitory life -- have been targets of music-industry subpoenas demanding the identities of offenders it plans to sue.

The recording industry's aggressive campaign to halt online music piracy has created a new legal dilemma for campus officials. Trapped between protecting student privacy and guarding university integrity and liability, colleges nationwide say they will clamp down on piracy occurring on their computer networks.

"One year ago, this issue was off the radar screen," says Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel for the American Council on Education. "Now, this is something that many, many schools are getting very serious about. They are telling students, 'Not only can you get sued, we are going to crack down if you misuse our academic facilities.' "

Students who've been following the recording industry's legal attack predict the crackdown will backfire despite cooperation from higher education leaders.

"I think the recording association is doing this in vain," said Tom Kanemoto, a junior at the University of California, Davis. "They haven't been able to give us what we want and for a price we can afford, so now they are going to sue. I'd like them to come live as a college student on my budget and see how much music they can afford to buy."

The recording industry has introduced Internet subscription sites -- MusicNet, Rhapsody, Pressplay -- that allow computer users to download music legally for a few dollars a month. But traffic to those sites is small compared to the numbers flocking to renegade sites that offer songs for free.

It's not yet clear how hard the recording industry association will come down on college students using university networks to download music, though it has already demonstrated how high the stakes can be. Last spring, the association sued four college students in New York, New Jersey and Michigan for storing copyrighted songs that others could access and download. Each student paid between $12,000 and $17,000 to settle.

So far, though, the bulk of subpoenas have targeted private Internet providers such as Comcast and Verizon whose customers are largely home personal computer users.

Officials for the recording industry association won't say how many subpoenas they've filed in court, or how many more will come, but of the estimated 1,000, only "5 to 10 percent have gone to college campuses," Steinbach says.

A spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America expressed gratitude for university efforts to curtail online sharing, but would not talk about its legal campaign on the record.

In California, UC Berkeley and UCLA each received one subpoena requesting the identities of their network users suspected of violating copyright laws.

UC officials say neither campus could trace illegal activity to a particular student and that the computers identified in both cases had been compromised by hackers. None of the seven other UC campuses has heard from the recording industry association.

But the small number of subpoenas has not stemmed the worries of top UC officials.

Last month, two UC senior vice presidents urged campus chancellors to "send a message to all members of your campus community detailing the risks associated with downloading copyrighted materials, including potential disciplinary action by the University, criminal prosecution and civil litigation by copyright holders."

Officials at UC Davis and Berkeley issued similar stern warnings about Internet copyright infringement to freshmen during summer orientation. Students will hear more about the perils of piracy in the opening weeks of school.

California State University, with 23 campuses and more than 400,000 students, also reports no subpoenas. California Community College officials don't either, but unlike UC and CSU, the two-year campuses don't provide Internet service to students.

Northeastern schools drew some of the college-directed subpoenas and two -- Boston College and Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- successfully challenged their validity on grounds that the recording industry association filed them in the wrong jurisdiction.

But Steinbach, the American Education Council lawyer, says students shouldn't interpret those challenges as a signal that universities won't ultimately reveal their names.

"Those were procedural challenges," he says. "I've heard of no campus saying they would challenge a validly issued subpoena."

Scott Hervey, a Sacramento intellectual property rights lawyer, says universities -- given their reliance on copyright laws -- have little choice but to comply with the recording industry's demands.

"When intellectual property law ensures that things developed at a university belong to the university, they can't then flout that law when it comes to the copyrights of someone else," Hervey says. "At the same time, they shouldn't and won't just roll over if faced with a subpoena that isn't proper."

Whether or not subpoenas come, college officials say they will hunker down to squash the use of peer-to-peer file-sharing on university networks though popular programs such as Kazaa and Morpheus.

UC Davis officials, for instance, send out formal warnings to students via e-mail when they receive legal notices from the music industry accusing students of copyright infringement. They disconnect the students from the university network temporarily and kick them off permanently should a second offense occur.

That strategy will continue, says Jan Carmikle, an analyst in the school's business contracts office who has become one of the campus' main downloading watchdogs.

"It's a problem and we have had some students with larger numbers of files stored on their computers," Carmikle says. "I think the big problem is that kids come to campus and they don't know that this is wrong, that it is illegal."

Still, Carmikle says, of the more than 500 warnings she has issued since late 1998, no more than three students became repeat offenders -- a factor she hopes will keep Davis students off the recording industry's list.

Kanemoto, however, said students are probably just shifting their file-sharing habits away from the university's network.

"The RIAA lawsuits aren't going to send us back into the music stores to buy CDs," he says. "Students off-campus will use other Internet providers. ... I don't see that changing much until the music industry figures out that we want good music at better prices."