The long-awaited barrage of lawsuits marks a turning point in the industry's three-year fight against online song-trading services like Kazaa and the now-defunct Napster, and one of the most controversial moments in the recording industry's digital history.
After long years avoiding direct conflict with file swappers who might also be record buyers, industry executives said they have lost patience. Monday's lawsuits are just the first wave of what the group said ultimately could be "thousands more" lawsuits filed over the next few months.
"Our goal is not to be vindictive or punitive," said RIAA President Cary Sherman. "It is simply to get peer-to-peer users to stop offering music that does not belong to them."
The lawsuits mark the first time that copyright laws have been used on a mass scale against individual Internet users. Legal actions have been taken on a sporadic basis against operators of pirate servers or sites, but ordinary computer users have never before been at serious risk of liability for widespread behaviour.
The RIAA said that's the point it's underlining with the unprecedented legal action. From the rise of Napster until today, tens of millions of people have started trading songs, movies and software online through services such as Kazaa with little thought for the legality of their actions. Even as the threat of Monday's lawsuits loomed, more than 2.8 million copies of the Kazaa software were downloaded last week, according to Download.com, a software aggregation site operated by CNET News.com publisher CNET Networks.
Indeed, a recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 67 percent of people downloading music said they did not care whether the music was copyrighted or not.
The slew of suits will put a serious price tag on those actions for the first time. Under copyright law, violators can be held liable for up to $150,000 (£94,553) per violation -- a measure that could result in stunningly high damage figures for some of the defendants in this round of suits. According to the RIAA, most of the people sued Monday were sharing 1,000 songs or more on the file-swapping networks.
Few of the suits are likely to go to trial, however. In the RIAA's previous round of copyright suits, filed against four university students in April, each defendant quickly settled, agreeing to pay damages of between $12,000 and $17,000. Many of today's defendants are also likely to settle.
Sherman said "a handful" of defendants had already agreed to preliminary settlement agreements, averaging payments of about $3,000 apiece.
Later settlements will likely have a higher price tag, since they will be coming after the lawsuits have been filed, Sherman said. However, each suit is being filed with information advising defendants whom to contact if they want a settlement.
Attorneys not involved in the dispute say the defendants will be hard-pressed to make a convincing case if the RIAA's evidence holds up in court. The industry trade group has collected long lists of files being shared by each defendant, traced those files to a specific network address, and used subpoenas to link that address to a specific Internet account.
Copyright law forbids distributing unauthorised copies of protected works, as well as actually making unauthorised copies. People who have shared considerable amounts of copyrighted files on file-swapping networks are likely to be seen as distributors, many attorneys say.
"This will be an uphill battle for anyone to defend," said Evan Cox, an intellectual property attorney with Covington and Burling in San Francisco. "When people put that many files in a shared folder and allow that to be exposed to the Internet, it's a pretty sure thing that they're distributing those copies."
Critics of the RIAA actions, including most notably the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), said that the RIAA might have made mistakes in some cases, including those where an Internet subscriber's account is held by several people, where parents were unaware of their children's behaviour or where the Net account is connected to a wireless network being made available to the public.
"You have to assume that the recording industry actually got the right person," EFF attorney Fred von Lohmann said. "It's Mom and Dad's name on the ISP account, for example, but that doesn't mean it's Mom and Dad using Kazaa. There are going to be a lot of complications."
The suits were filed across the United States, and included users of Kazaa, Blubster, Grokster and several other file-swapping software programs.
Several related lawsuits remain open as these go to court. A handful of Internet service providers, including Pacific Bell Internet Services, a division of SBC Communications, in California, have challenged the validity of the subpoenas used by the RIAA to collect file swappers' identities. One individual, who as yet remains anonymous, has also challenged the subpoena process, saying it violates her right to privacy.
Alongside the lawsuits, the RIAA also released details of an online amnesty campaign, offering worried file swappers a provisional shield against being sued if they turn themselves in before a suit is filed.
Under the "Clean Slate" program, file swappers must destroy any copies of copyrighted works they have downloaded from services such as Kazaa, and sign a notarised affidavit pledging never to trade copyrighted works online again.
Anybody who signs and returns the document will not be targeted by the RIAA based on past infringement, Sherman said. However, if their names come up in future file-swapping sweeps, any amnesty seekers could be liable for potentially higher damages based on "willful infringement."
The group said it would not use the information gathered for marketing purposes or share it with any other group of copyright holders. Critics such as the EFF's von Lohmann dismissed the assurances, saying that the RIAA's privacy policy allowed the information to be shared if "required by law," a clause which could allow groups such as music publishers or Hollywood studios to subpoena the information from the RIAA to use in their own lawsuits.
Talkback
The notion of copyrighted songs needs to be reviewed. How can anyone say they have a legal right to prevent the air surrounding people not to be vibrated at certain frequencies in certain orders that creates sound and song. In my correct opinion recording artist should make money from selling CD for their artwork, and not for the right to have your surrounding air vibrating at those freuencies. They should also do more concerts to make money that way too. Record companies are have made too much money for too long. Downloading is the best thing that has happened to music. The increased competition for reduced sales is creating better music (proof of this is that new music is a lot better now than it has been in a long long time), as artist are fighting for the more reluctant buyer. I hope the record companies all lose out and musicians get a sallery closer to what their job is actually worth. No one can tell me a popular recording artist is worth more than any one Doctor, but who earns the most?
Copyright rules are wrong. They prevent society from going forward. There are plenty of real life examples of this, one of which is the inverntion of the computer
The invention of the PC was infact very close to an infringement of copyright rules. IBM got away with it on a technicality and spent thousand of dollers prooving that the proccesor they used was infact designed by engineers who had not been aware of a previous microchip that was protected by copyright law. The engineers were not aware of the microchip, but the person who gave them the design breif was too well aware of it and was purposefully trying to copy it (a fact he admits), so in reality what is the difference?
The point I am making is that I do not believe that if you create something such as a microchip or a song or anything, surely other people should be allowed to do what ever they like to it, weather it be improve upon someone else's design so the whole of society can benefit (as with the case with IBM, we have all benefited from computers) or weather it be distributed so other people can appreciate that artists music and may well be tempted to buy the artists work themselves.
The point I am trying to make is that copyright laws prevent society from going forward. It is not stealling as someone said, by definition. Stealling is permantly depriving someone of something somebody owns. Since the copyright owner has not been deprived of the song, nothing has been stolen. It is exactly the same as walking past a busker on a street and not dropping money in his basket. You've heard his music but you have not paid for it. Your are not legally obliged to pay for it. What is the difference between this and downloading music? Downloading music of the interenet is done by choice, you do not choose to listen to a busker. True, but what is the true value of a song anyway? How can a song be worth anything? In true meaning, tha value of an object is only what someone is prepared to pay. If people arn't prepared to pay for music and wish to download it for free, it's got no value. But the law is their to protect people, but who is being protected by copyright laws. This brings me back to my original point, and why the example was relevent. Making record companies more slimline free's up monies that people don't wish to spend on music and free's up the valuealbe workforce to do more valueable jobs (less money in the music businss = less jobs in the music business). People spending money on more important things and the whole of society can benefit from the money saved . What single us is copyright law other than preventing the naturall progresion of society to aid the few at the expence of many. My fear is as a society we will all come the fate of last great society, the Romans. There sociiety fell apart because after a great period of change, there then refused to change for centuies. We have gone through a great period of change, but copyright laws will prevent more rapid change as business protect their own intrest at the expence of the people.