The Recording Industry Association of America has sent out in the region of 25 letters apologising to institutions they had wrongly accused of hosting illegal music on their servers. As previously reported the RIAA have started contacting direct people who they reckon have been making music available online illegally, but they admit that their automated web crawlers has made a few errors.
For example they have apologised to a group of Penn State University professors who they accused of illegally posting songs by R&B singer Usher on a university-hosted FTP site. It seems the RIAA's web crawlers linked an MP3 of an a cappella song by a group of astronomers about the Swift gamma ray satellite with papers posted by an astrophysics professor emeritus named Peter Usher and put two and two together.
RIAA spokesperson Jonathan Lamy told reporters the errors should have been spotted by a temp employer before the original letters were sent out: "When this matter was brought to our attention, we immediately began an examination of other notices this particular temp. employee reviewed. If we found errors, we immediately contacted the appropriate person and withdrew the notice."
Although these cases show the technology they are using isn't fool proof the RIAA reckon the vast majority of the thousands of letters they've sent out in the last few weeks deal with genuine cases of illegal file sharing.