The music industry’s all-out assault on peer-to-peer file sharing continued Thursday, with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filing lawsuits against 757 individuals at 17 colleges.

The lawsuits break down into two categories. Some 64 suits target "John Doe," seeking the identity of college students sharing unauthorized music files through the application i2hub over the high-speed Internet2 computer network used at many universities.

The suits also target users sharing files over such peer-to-peer services as eDonkey, Grokster, Kazaa, WinMX, and LimeWire.

"The authority of the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling in the Grokster case should not be ignored by students returning to campus this fall with sights set on free music," said Cary Sherman of the RIAA. "Those who continue to engage in this online theft pose a direct threat to the music community's ability to invest in new bands and the new music that fans want to hear. These lawsuits are an important part of our defense against that threat."

Since it began attempting to sue individual file-sharers, the RIAA has issued lawsuits against 14,800 people.

The suits come in the wake of seven cease-and-desist letters sent two weeks ago to peer-to-peer services like WinMX and eDonkey, which have shut down and promised to do so, respectively. Those letters cited the US Supreme Court's decision in June in MGM v. Grokster, which found that Grokster could be sued for inducing copyright infringement for acts taken in the course of marketing file-sharing software.

Testifying before the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary Wednesday, Sam Yagan, chief executive of eDonkey creator MetaMachine, said his firm was "throwing in the towel" in the legal fight with the music industry.

WinMX shut down last week, and other services like Kazaa and BitTorrent have vowed to build technology in their software to prevent copyright infringement.