Letters sent out in the last week by the Recording Industry Association of America informed the companies of the alleged piracy and warned that employees and employers might be subjected to "significant legal damages." However, the letters made no explicit threat to sue.
The RIAA declined to name the companies that received the letters, but said some of them are the same ones who were given warnings in October and February about piracy. About 35 percent of the latest letters went to technology companies, 20 percent to health-care firms, 20 percent to manufacturers and the rest to miscellaneous industries, the RIAA said.
The RIAA's action drew protest from the Information Technology Association of America, a trade group representing Microsoft, IBM and more than 400 other software and service companies.
"When corporations are trying to protect themselves from major hackers and terrorists ... trying to do serious damage to their networks, I don't know that they want to spend their time chasing down a half-dozen employees who like to trade old Rolling Stones songs," said the group's president, Harris Miller. "It's a matter of prioritization."
Miller said his group opposes piracy, but the labels erred in not coming up with a new business model for the Internet age.
Copyright law experts said companies might be liable for piracy on their networks if they know about it but don't do anything about it. It's unclear whether companies are obligated to police their networks and remove unauthorized copies of songs before they're asked to do so, said Mark Radcliffe, a lawyer in Palo Alto who specializes in intellectual property.
"I think what they're trying to do is get people thinking 'Gee, I'm in this gray area, and I don't want to be the guy who gets fingered for the test case,"' Radcliffe said. "As a corporation, do you really want to be in the news defending the right of your employees to have pirated music on your network?"
The letters point out the copyright owners can collect up to $150,000 per song copied without permission, plus legal fees and profits earned by the infringer on the copyright, and that the equipment used to make illegal copies can be confiscated. In one case, the RIAA found 20,000 songs being offered by 70 employees.
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