Back to Cynthia's roundup - she quotes a Washington Post story:

The RIAA is hoping its online sweep and legal actions will put the brakes on rampant file sharing. The music industry claims to have lost millions of dollars in CD sales to file swapping from the Internet. "We'd much rather spend time making music then dealing with legal issues in courtrooms. But we cannot stand by while piracy takes a devastating toll on artists, musicians, songwriters, retailers and everyone in the music industry," Sherman said in a statement yesterday.

Just how extensive will the RIAA campaign be? "We have no hard and fast rules about how many files you have to be distributing" to be targeted in the RIAA sweep, Sherman said, according to washingtonpost.com. "Any individual computer user who continues to steal music will face the very real risk of having to face the music." The Washington Post provided details of how the RIAA plans to play detective online: "The RIAA said it would use the public directories of peer-to-peer software programs and issue subpoenas to Internet service providers to track down people trading music files." A number of media outlets noted that the RIAA said it will begin filing suits within the next two months.

San Jose Mercury News:

A recent federal district court ruling all but assured the strategy to target individuals, after a judge in Los Angeles found that the companies behind popular file-sharing software like Morpheus and Grokster could not be held liable for illegal activities of their users," the paper said. "That April ruling is under appeal. The recording industry has been laying the legal groundwork for this new, more personal assault on Internet music piracy for more than a year. It subpoenaed Verizon Internet Services in July for the name of a individual subscriber accused of downloading more than 600 songs via Kazaa. When Verizon refused, the RIAA successfully compelled the disclosure through federal court. That case, while still under appeal, established the recording industry's right to use subpoena power granted under federal copyright law to identify suspected copyright infringers.

CNET:

ISPs are bracing for what Verizon Vice President Sarah Deutsch called 'an avalanche of subpoenas,' as the labels turn to service providers to help them identify file swappers ... She said there's no mechanism in place under the subpoena process to ensure that customers aren't mistakenly targeted or that their personal information is only used for the purposes of the lawsuit. She also worries that other copyright holders might follow the RIAA's lead, putting ISPs in the middle of the copyright debate and forcing them to spend time and money processing thousands of requests to identify subscribers who haven't been proven guilty of anything.