The Recording Industry of America Association yesterday stepped up its war against downloading by going for the downloaders direct. Fresh from its court victory last week where judges said US based ISP Verizon did have to hand over the contact details of one of their customers who the record labels suspect of exchanging serious amounts of music, the RIAA has tracked down the email addresses of some 200,000 people exchanging music files via Grokster and Kazaa and has emailed them a stern warning.
"It appears that you are offering copyrighted music to others from your computer," the warning read. "When you break the law, you risk legal penalties. There is a simple way to avoid that risk: don't steal music either by offering it to others to copy or downloading it on a file-sharing system like this. When you offer music on these systems, you are not anonymous and you can easily be identified." It's a dangerous move because while those 200,000 people (and the 100,000s of others expected to be sent the message) may download music via their computers, they also probably buy large amounts of music from record stores, and therefore the record labels are threatening the very people they depend on to stay in business.
Sharman Networks Ltd, the company behind Kazaa, attacked the move saying the RIAA was choosing to "attack some of its most loyal customers". Some insiders fear that if the RIAA goes through with its threat, and starts suing individual downloaders, the downloading community will organise boycotts that will severely hit real world record sales. Elsewhere in the world of downloading good news from Apple following the first day of their iTunes website. Despite being US based and only Mac compatible the service sold 200,000 tracks at a dollar a time on its first day of trading. Good news for the five major labels who all have tracks available to buy via the service.