Washington - The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on Thursday announced that it has sent another round of over 400 letters to students and network users at 19 universities, offering settlement deals to suspected music file-swappers it intends to sue for copyright infringement.

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The current set is the ninth batch of such letters the RIAA has sent to university network users; the record label trade organization has sued over 20,000 individuals for illegal file-sharing.

Earlier this week, the RIAA also took the next step of actually filing suit against 19 students at George Washington University who reportedly did not accept the pre-litigation settlement offers, CNET News.com reported.

News.com also pointed out that some of the dates listed on which the IP addresses of alleged file-swappers were culled are over seven months old, and some universities have stated policies of only keeping records on exactly who IP addresses are assigned to for several days.

"Anecdotally, our members have reported varying retention practices -- ranging from keeping them for as little time as necessary, usually a few days, for internal security purposes to keeping them indefinitely. There is little uniformity in practice based upon our informal inquiries." Rodney Petersen, government relations officer at Educause, a nonprofit that represents universities and manages the .edu domain, told News.com.

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