In the ever-shifting battle between unauthorized music downloaders and the Record Industry of America Association (RIAA), the latest salvo comes from the ISP community, which is fed up with playing piggy-in-the-middle and getting saddled with a lot of the costs.

NetCoalition, an organization that represents ISPs across America, has sent a letter to the RIAA today, setting out the problems ISPs face in dealing with the record industry’s litigious approach to point-to-point file sharing.

The letter is in response to the RIAA's announced plans to file lawsuits against hundreds of individual computer users who illegally share music files on the Internet. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the association has sent out about a 1,000 subpoenas in a matter of weeks (see Service Providers Fear P2P Crackdown).

”These are landing on the doorsteps of ISPs up and down the country that do not have legal departments to process them,” says Kevin McGuiness, executive director and general counsel of NetCoalition. He says the two key issues overwhelming ISPs are the costs associated with forcing them to turn off their customers and the privacy issues associated with this.

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— Jo Maitland, Senior Editor, Boardwatch