Labels Will See Music File Sharers in Court

Unable to stamp out Internet music piracy through education or threats, the record labels on Wednesday said they will start suing thousands of people who share songs online.

The Recording Industry Assn. of America announced that it plans to spend the next month identifying targets among the estimated 57 million people using file-sharing networks in the United States, focusing on those offering a “significant” amount of songs for others to copy.

Then, in August, RIAA will file its first lawsuits, President Cary Sherman said.

The new campaign broadens the labels’ anti-piracy dragnet far beyond the four college students who settled claims last month that they were running illegal file-sharing networks on campus. Now the industry plans to pursue not only those running such services but also the users who supply them with music.

“I don’t think anybody likes to be in lawsuits, but we’ve tried in thousands of ways to deal with the problem,” said Zach Horowitz, president of Vivendi Universal’s Universal Music Group. “I just think that there’s not a lot of other alternatives for us now.”

Many in the music industry had hoped to avoid hauling potential customers into court. But the decision to sue individuals reflects the seething frustration among executives, songwriters, performers and retailers over the relentlessness of online piracy, on which they blame a 25% drop in sales of CDs since 1999.

Despite lawsuits against Napster Inc. and other file-sharing networks, huge numbers of people continue to use such systems to make billions of illegal copies of songs from the labels’ recordings without fear or remorse. Now the labels want to instill a measure of both.

“The message up to now has been, ‘No, no, no, no, no -- be good kids, don’t do it,’ and everybody laughs at us, saying, ‘What are you going to do, sue me? Are you going to risk the bad press?’ ” one label executive said. “I think we’re at a moment where maybe we need really bad press.”

Although RIAA represents the record industry -- and its action Wednesday was supported by acts as diverse as the Dixie Chicks and Shakira -- a number of record-label and online-music executives quietly questioned whether a legal offensive addresses the industry’s fundamental problems.

The labels, they said, need to stop focusing on lawsuits and start concentrating on the new market that is emerging online. “There is no positive message coming out, no coordinated, positive message coming out in support of the online services,” one critic said.

File-sharing systems, also known as peer-to-peer networks, enable users to copy songs, movies and other digital goods from one another’s computers free. Introduced to the mass market by Napster in 1999, file sharing has grown so popular that a single system -- Kazaa -- makes about 800 million files available.

The labels successfully sued Napster into submission two years ago. On April 25, however, U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson in Los Angeles ruled that two succeeding systems, Morpheus and Grokster, were legal even though their users routinely made illegal copies of music and movie files.

Wilson’s ruling, which the labels and Hollywood studios are appealing, helped push more music industry executives to accept the need to sue individual users, Sherman said. Another federal judge’s ruling in January made it easier for the labels to force Internet service providers to identify subscribers whose accounts were being used by file sharers who allegedly violated copyrights.

Legal experts say that it’s hard to defend a file sharer who offers a large number of copyrighted songs for strangers to copy through the Internet. RIAA is also trying to make a compelling emotional case in favor of the lawsuits, citing songwriters who’ve seen their royalties evaporate, music retailers who’ve closed stores, artists who’ve been dropped from labels and musicians who’ve lost jobs at recording studios.

The risk is that music fans and lawmakers will view the lawsuits as heavy-handed, particularly if a number of the heretofore anonymous file sharers turn out to be children -- or if law-abiding users of file-sharing networks are targeted by mistake. Meanwhile, new software is popping up to let people share files without revealing their location, making it significantly harder to sue them.

Sherman said RIAA is confident that its enforcement efforts will fall only on copyright violators, although some lawsuits probably will be brought against parents who unwittingly aided their children’s file sharing -- and even against those who unwittingly share music.

He also said that the association will “keep filing lawsuits on a regular basis until people get the message.”

Some technology advocates, however, say RIAA is the one missing the message.

“The American public has really spoken on this, and the idea of suing them all into submission is a dead loser,” said Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is helping to defend the Morpheus file-sharing software in federal court. “There’s a lot more to be gained from turning this into a win-win” by finding a way to legalize file sharing and compensate copyright holders.

Spokesmen for three leading file-sharing networks -- Kazaa, Grokster and Morpheus -- echoed Von Lohmann’s sentiments. Although some have acknowledged in court that their users may violate copyright laws, on Wednesday they insisted that lawsuits were the wrong way to change behavior.

“History has shown that you cannot stop technological innovation,” said Michael Weiss, chief executive of StreamCast Networks Inc. of Bellevue, Wash., which distributes the Morpheus software. RIAA’s lawsuits are merely painful steps to get to the inevitable, he said, which is that “old media will embrace new media, they’ll embrace technological innovation, and they’ll benefit from it.”

To many in the music industry, however, file-sharing software has given people an unprecedented opportunity to copy music free, which in turn has led to an unimaginable amount of piracy. And the only difference between online music piracy and shoplifting, they say, is that file sharers don’t think they’re going to get caught.

Suing individual file sharers has been part of RIAA’s anti-piracy strategy for more than a year, Sherman said. But the lawsuits were held up in part by RIAA’s battle with Verizon Communications Inc. over using subpoenas to obtain the identity of suspected pirates, and in part by the lack of legitimate sources of music online.

The recent success of Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes Music Store, which sold 5 million downloadable songs in its first eight weeks to Macintosh computer users, helped convince label executives that the time was right to proceed. Some analysts, however, argue that the labels still haven’t allowed online music services to provide most consumers with a compelling alternative to file sharing.

The news of RIAA’s initiative came as an unpleasant shock to one 21-year-old UCLA student, who said she regularly uses two file-sharing programs and asked not to be identified.

“Thanks for the warning. I’ve got to go. I’m going to uninstall that software right now,” she said before abruptly hanging up the phone.

Times staff writer P.J. Huffstutter contributed to this report.