A recording-industry trade group said last night it had sued 261 people for distributing hundreds of thousands of songs over the Internet without permission and said more suits are pending.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said it filed copyright-infringement suits in US courts across the country - the first time the group has taken legal action against Internet users who copy music directly from each others' hard drives.
Until now, the trade group has focused its courtroom efforts on Kazaa and other "peer-to-peer" networks that enable such activity, which the industry blames for a decline in CD sales.
"Nobody likes playing the heavy and having to resort to litigation, but when your product is being regularly stolen there comes a time when you have to take appropriate action," RIAA President Mr Cary Sherman said.
Those facing the lawsuits had opened up their hard drives to other users, making an average of more than 1,000 copyrighted songs available to others over peer-to-peer networks, Mr Sherman said. Users who simply copied songs and did not share their own music collections were not targeted, he said.
The trade group also unveiled an amnesty programme that would remove the threat of prosecution from those who promise to refrain from such activity in the future and erase all copyrighted music they have downloaded.
The programme will not be available for those who are already being investigated, Mr Sherman said.