Group Files Song-Sharing Lawsuits in 17 Countries

The international record industry launched thousands more lawsuits around the world Tuesday against individuals it accused of illegally sharing digital music online.

The new wave of legal actions by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry encompasses 8,000 cases in 17 countries, including its first legal moves in South America and Eastern Europe.

The actions, a combination of criminal and civil suits, are aimed at “uploaders” -- people who have put hundreds or thousands of copyrighted songs onto Internet file-sharing networks and offered them to millions of people worldwide without permission from the copyright owners.

The industry estimates that such illegal file-sharing has cost it billions of dollars in lost revenue.

The London-based group, which represents 1,450 member record companies around the world, said many of the people targeted were the parents of children who were illegally sharing music files.

The music industry has been criticized for targeting individual Internet users in its legal warfare against piracy instead of the Internet service providers that host file-swapping sites.

The providers are harder to pursue legally because they can claim they have no knowledge of any piracy occurring on their networks. John Kennedy, the federation chairman, made no apology Tuesday for the industry’s approach.

“Around the world many people have already paid a heavy price for their illegal file-sharing,” Kennedy said.

“They all thought they were unlikely to be caught, but teachers, postal workers, IT managers, scientists and people in a host of other occupations, as well as parents, have ended up having to dig deeply into their pockets,” he said.

The legal actions were extended for the first time to Brazil, where the federation said more than 1 billion music tracks were illegally downloaded last year and where record company revenues have almost halved -- to $395 million last year from $724.7 million in 2000. Mexico and Poland too are seeing file-sharing lawsuits for the first time.

The federation said more than 2,300 people had already been fined or had paid compensation averaging about $3,100.

The federation said it targeted uploaders using all the major unauthorized peer-to-peer services, including BitTorrent, eDonkey, DirectConnect, Gnutella, Limewire, SoulSeek and WinMX.