Music industry targets web cheats

THE American music industry has stepped up its controversial offensive against people who illegally download music online with a new manoeuvre that enables it to sue a further 532 unnamed individuals.

The move is an attempt to get around a court decision in December that blocked music companies' attempts to sue illegal downloaders by making it impossible for them to get the culprits' names.

A federal appeals court ruled that internet service providers did not have to provide the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) with names of individual customers.

The ruling did little to shake the industry's resolve. In its latest attempt to attack free downloading, the RIAA has identified people who swap song files online by the numerical web addresses that identify all computers on a network. Armed with that information, it now plans to find out their names and addresses by issuing subpoenas.

'Our campaign against illegal file sharers is not missing a beat,' president Cary Sherman said. The association has been trying to find a way to discourage the public from downloading music free from the internet, an exercise it brands as theft. Last year it sued more than 1,000 people who, it claimed, had downloaded particularly large numbers of songs.

The campaign has prompted outrage among music buyers and computer users, who say that the industry has only itself to blame for failing to deliver music the way many modern consumers want it - digitally. The RIAA counters that its measures are necessary because free downloading has helped to slash CD sales in the US by more than a quarter in the past three years.

The internet service providers has complained that the demand to provide names of their customers to the music industry was a breach of privacy. But RIAA sources indicated that the new approach was suggested to them by the ISPs.

The RIAA's original legal attack on music downloaders depended on a lower court decision that ISPs had to hand over suspects' names. But the appeals court ruled that the relevant law applies only to public websites and not to computers in people's homes. Since most music downloading is carried out between individuals' hard-drives on so-called peer-to-peer networks, the law does not apply, it said.