"The law is clear and the message to those who are distributing substantial quantities of music on-line should be equally clear - this activity is illegal, you are not anonymous when you do it, and engaging in it can have real consequences," said RIAA president Cary Sherman.
The RIAA warned that, starting today, it is gathering the evidence it needs as the basis for filing what could ultimately be thousands of lawsuits charging individual peer-to-peer music distributors with copyright infringement. The first round of suits could take place as early as mid-August.
"Once we begin our evidence-gathering process, any individual computer user who continues to offer music illegally to millions of others will run the very real risk of facing legal action in the form of civil lawsuits that will cost violators thousands of dollars and potentially subject them to criminal prosecution," said Sherman.
According to the RIAA, it will be using software that scans the public directories available to any user of a peer-to-peer network. These directories, which allow users to find the material they are looking for, list all the files that other users of the network are currently offering to distribute. When the software finds a user who is offering to distribute copyrighted music files, it downloads some of the infringing files, along with the date and time it accessed the files.
Additional information that is publicly available from these systems allows the RIAA to then identify their Internet Service Provider (ISP). The RIAA can then serve a subpoena on the ISP requesting the name and address of the individual whose account was being used to distribute copyrighted music.
Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), ISPs must provide copyright holders with such information when there is reason to believe copyrights are being infringed. The RIAA will then be able to take whatever legal action it sees fit against the pirate. The RIAA says that almost all ISPs disclose their DMCA obligation in the users' terms of service.
The ISP division of US telecoms giant Verizon tried to argue against this requirement, ultimately without success. Early this month, the company gave in to a court order to reveal the identities of two of its customers, accused by the RIAA of infringing copyright.
The British music industry's approach to peer-to-peer problems is addressed in the current OUT-LAW Magazine.