Music piracy fight - coming to an office near you

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has written a threatening letter to 300 companies whose employees are downloading copyrighted music files, promising legal action if they do not crack down on the practice.

For months the industry body has been posturing in this manner and issuing blanket threats to companies who do not keep their employees on a tighter lead. Previously the RIAA had written to all Fortune 1000 companies warning them of the dangers of file-sharing in the workplace - most notably the danger of being sued by the RIAA.

Yesterday the British Phonographic Industry accused BT Openworld of aiding and abetting file-sharers enjoying the benefits of its download-friendly bandwidth.

Earlier this year Stelios Haji-Ioannou was taken to court for allowing customers at his internet cafés to burn CDs. The problem was that many chose to burn CDs of illegally downloaded music.

Then there's the file-sharer whose withheld identity is a matter of great legal concern at the moment. US local operator Verizon is fighting an order from the courts to hand the unnamed individual - with a prolific download habit - over to the RIAA.

So what does it all mean? The overall picture here is of an industry in disarray, fighting on all fronts in the hope of success on any one.

At the time of the Easy café case Charlotte McConnell, a solicitor at specialist IT law firm Bristows, said: "It seems that with music piracy, the courts are keen to find a commercial entity to blame. The primary infringers are the individuals downloading the music. But individuals are difficult to catch."

This sums up the problem precisely. The individuals are to blame but the RIAA and BPI realise there is little chance of ever prosecuting individuals. The disparity between the cost of trying to do so and the reparations they may receive is too great to even consider.

As such they are throwing mud at all the commercial companies they can implicate in the hope that some of it will stick, profitably.

But when this fails, where next? PC World for selling the PCs used? Google for returning the searches which lead people to download services*? Or perhaps it would be better off being a little more introspective.

The truth is that the music industry is ill-equipped to operate in the digital age and its desperate legal-peddling reveals a desire to cover up this inadequacy. It has never been proven that Napster dented CD sales - many suggest its 'try before you buy' appeal actually boosted sales. What can be said for sure is that the embarrassment of losing first mover advantage to college drop-out and Napster founder Shawn Fanning is something the multimillion dollar music industry is still reeling from.

Without Napster we wouldn't have MusicNet or Pressplay - the two largest legal download services, launched by the major labels. Without the likes of KaZaA the record industry would have continued in the same anachronistic rut it had ploughed for years. The war it is waging has forced the industry to modernise but it doesn't seem ready to write-off the costs incurred, treating them like consultancy fees resultant from that process.

*With thanks to silicon.com reader Paul Bouzan for this suggestion.