On September 8, 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America filed 261 federal lawsuits against individual music fans accused of illegally sharing songs on peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa and Morpheus. It was the opening shot in what became a years-long legal campaign against the record industry’s own customers, at a moment when Napster-style file sharing had already upended how people got their music.
The RIAA framed the targets as “major offenders,” each accused of sharing on average more than a thousand copyrighted files. In practice, the dragnet caught far more sympathetic defendants than habitual pirates: a Yale professor, an unemployed woman in New York, an elderly man who barely used his computer, and — most notoriously — a 12-year-old girl in New York City public housing whose family ended up settling for $2,000 and a public apology. Because federal law allowed damages up to $150,000 per shared song, even ordinary users faced financially ruinous exposure, and the lawsuits became a case study in how not to win over the public during a piracy crackdown.
The RIAA kept filing suits like this for years afterward, eventually shifting strategy toward suing file-sharing services directly and, later, working with ISPs on graduated-response warnings instead. The episode remains a touchstone in the history of digital copyright enforcement and helped shape the streaming-first model the music industry relies on today.
Source: History.com
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