The music industry's antipiracy efforts took an embarrassing turn Tuesday when the Recording Industry Association of America acknowledged that it has erroneously sent dozens of copyright infringement notices.

The RIAA said Tuesday that a temporary worker was responsible for firing off legal notifications last week that invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act without confirming that any copyrighted files were actually being offered for download. "We have sent two dozen withdrawal notices--all appear related to this particular temp," the RIAA said in a statement. "We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused."

On Monday, as first reported by CNET News.com, the RIAA withdrew a DMCA notice to Penn State University's astronomy and astrophysics department. Sent during Penn State's final exams, it prompted the central computing office at the campus to threaten the department with having its Internet connection severed unless the infringing material was removed.

The problem, however, was that no infringing file existed on the department's computer. The RIAA's automated program apparently confused two separate pieces of information--a legal MP3 and a directory named "usher"--and concluded there was an illegal copy of a song by the musician Usher.

In a second incident, Speakeasy, a national broadband provider, said Tuesday that the RIAA had apologized for sending it a cease-and-desist letter alleging illegal activity on a subscriber's FTP site devoted to the Commodore Amiga computer. The RIAA's form letter sent to Speakeasy last Thursday alleged the Amigascne.org site illegally "offers approximately 0 sound files for download. Many of these files contain recordings owned by our member companies, including songs by such artists as Creed."

The errors represent a black eye for the RIAA's latest efforts against piracy, which rely on automated crawlers to scour the Internet in an attempt to find material that is being distributed in a way that violates federal copyright law. The RIAA refuses to disclose what techniques its crawlers use, but the group appears to employ companies such as MediaForce and MediaDefender. Its copyright enforcers are not required to listen to an allegedly infringing MP3 file in its entirety, the RIAA has acknowledged.

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