Following similar actions taken by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed lawsuits yesterday against students at 12 universities for allegedly violating copyright law.

The MPAA is targeting users who allegedly have shared movies illegally over the Internet, while the RIAA’s suits focus on copyright violations concerning online music sharing.

In a press release Tuesday, the MPAA said that such copyright violations perpetrated over the Internet have become a serious problem on college campuses.

Like the RIAA, the MPAA specifically cited file-sharing applications such as “i2hub” that take advantage of special networks used by academic institutions.

The MPAA sued students at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Texas, Columbia University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Rochester, Boston University, the University of Ohio at Cincinnati, the University of Ohio at Columbus, Ohio State University, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, according to spokeswoman Kori Bernards.

Bernards said the MPAA, like the RIAA, will litigate against college students using “John Doe” lawsuits—meaning that each lawsuit is filed against an unnamed person whose IP address has allegedly participated in online file-sharing.

In such cases, the plaintiff typically would subpoena the colleges and universities involved in order to obtain the names of the people using those IP addresses.

Bernards said the MPAA wants to send the message to students that their illegal actions can be detected.

“A lot of people who are stealing movies over the Internet think that they’re anonymous, and the more we point out that they’re not, the less likely they are to do it,” she said.

While the MPAA has not announced any suits against Harvard students at this time, Bernards said that it will continue to pursue legal action “as needed.”

Boston University will comply with the MPAA’s subpoenas, Spokesman Colin D. Riley said.

“We’re in the unenviable position of having to comply with subpoenas to identify individuals who allegedly have broken the law,” he said.

Riley added that students have no excuse for pirating copyrighted material.

“We communicate with students that they should not be illegally downloading material, and if they do, they run the risk of having to obtain lawyers and defend themselves from lawsuits,” he said. “Students...are certainly intelligent enough to understand that.”

In addition to the lawsuits against i2hub users on college campuses, the MPAA also filed several dozen lawsuits against named defendants yesterday, according to Bernards.

This marks the first time the MPAA has sued individuals under their actual names instead of using the “John Doe” suits.

—Staff writer Matthew S. Lebowitz can be reached at mslebow@fas.harvard.edu.