The RIAA launched yet another new anti-piracy campaign, this time using instant messaging (IM), to communicate with millions of individual users it has identified as sharing music files using KaZaA and Grokster. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the target group, college students, will be contacted in an “educational outreach effort” which also includes an explicit warning to discontinue file-sharing activities. From the text of the RIAA message: “When you break the law, you risk legal penalties. There is a simple way to avoid that risk: DON’T STEAL MUSIC, either by offering it to others to copy or downloading it on a “file-sharing” system like this. When you offer music on these systems, you are not anonymous and you can easily be identified.”
The screen shots of the RIAA message are here and here.