Music industry sues US song-swapping site

NEW YORK (Top40 Charts) - In its latest attempt to halt music piracy, a contingency of music industry groups, including the labels, songwriters and music publishers, filed a lawsuit against U.S. file-sharing Internet service Audiogalaxy .com.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a powerful trade association for the music labels, and the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA), filed the suit on Friday in a New York federal court.

The suit alleges Audiogalaxy, based in Austin, Texas, "wilfully and intentionally" encourages and facilitates "millions of individual, anonymous users to copy and distribute infringing copyrighted works by the millions, if not billions."

The RIAA, on behalf of the labels, has waged a series of legal battles against a crop of online file-swapping services which users have exploited to trade all manner of copyrighted materials from music to movies and software prorgrams.

The record industry blames the rise of such services for encouraging consumers to conduct a massive trade in recorded music, a phenomenon they claim is eating into sales. The RIAA has cases pending against similar services including Grokster, Morpheus MusicCity, Kazaa and its owner Streamcast Networks.

The industry's most successful legal thrust grounded the original peer-to-peer song-swapping network Napster , now controlled by Bertelsmann AG.

Among the artists whose works are traded on Audiogalaxy include: Celine Dion, Madonna , Destiny's Child and Dave Matthews Band , the suit alleges.

The RIAA said Audiogalaxy has ignored numerous warnings to halt the trade of copyright-protected music by its users.