Speaking to the BBC, the president of US trade group the Music Publishers Association, Lauren Keiser, said that the campaign would target “very big sites that people would think are legitimate and very, very popular".
He indicated that he would be seeking jail sentences for site owners, along with fines and enforced website closures.
Last week, music-publishing firm Warner Chappell forced freeware developer Walter Ritter to withdraw his pearLyric software – which until 6th December helped Mac users find song lyrics for whatever song they were playing in iTunes. Song lyrics were fetched either directly from the music file via iTunes, from text files in a local directory, or were searched and fetched from publicly available websites.
The developer received a “cease and desist” letter from the firm. As Ritter said in a website posting, “I can not afford to risk a lawsuit against such a big company, although personally I don't see where pearLyrics should infringe any copyrights handled by them.”
“After all pearLyrics only searches and accesses publicly available websites, displays, and, at the users wish, caches its content,” he added.
The new campaign follows a much-publicised industry crackdown on file sharing – where music fans use peer-to-peer software to illegally share copyrighted digital music files.
