When the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was first introduced in Congress six years ago, it was viewed by lawmakers as a means of bringing the United States' copyright laws into line with other countries that adhere to the standards set by World Intellectual Property Organization treaties.

But even before the DMCA was signed into law in 1998, the entertainment industry had staked one side of a battlefield that had consumer electronics manufacturers, providers of online services, First Amendment experts and other interests aligned against the other.

It was inevitable that the music biz would lead the charge, if only because music downloads are more feasible for the average American with a computer and a high-speed Internet connection than are full-length movies and TV series.

The RIAA, which stands alongside the MPAA as showbiz's most powerful lobbying group, has taken legal action around the world to shut down file-sharing services starting with Napster and Scour. It has battled technology developments that it deems to be aiding and abetting copyright crime. It has also targeted the Internet service providers and telephone companies that provide the two-way pipe that facilitate the download-on-demand marketplace.

But the RIAA took its campaign into uncharted legal waters in April when it began suing individuals that it suspected of engaging in unauthorized downloads of copyrighted materials. The trade organization used its DMCA authority to issue subpoenas -- which lack a judge's scrutiny, since they require only the signature of a federal court clerk -- and force ISPs, telephone companies and others to reveal the true identity of previously anonymous customers.

That amounts to a dangerous level of authority to grant to a private trade group and possibly a violation of the Constitution, legal experts say.

"We are told that copyright owners are entitled to this unprecedented subpoena power so they can effectively exploit their copyright monopolies," said attorney Daniel Ballard of McDonough Holland & Allen. "We are not told why that right -- or that monopoly -- is more valuable than the privacy and due process rights those subpoenas invade." McDonough Holland & Allen represents at least four of the individuals who have been sued and has consulted with about 20 more.

For all the wide-ranging strategies and tactics in play in recent and pending digital copyright cases, the arguments boil down to a tug of war over protecting the fair-use rights of consumers versus the ownership interests of copyright holders. The music industry is waging all-out war on this front at a time when CD sales continue to decline, falling another 9% domestically and 11% worldwide last year.

"There is no question that piracy is a huge component of the challenge," RIAA chairman and CEO Mitch Bainwol said. "Obviously you've got physical piracy and the online piracy. To suggest that piracy is not a major factor in the decline of sales is not supportable."

Consumers are fighting for the freedom to make the most of new technologies in the sanctity of their own homes and on their own digital devices. The latest cases have drawn on the precedent established in 1984 by the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the so-called Betamax case that fair use encompassed home videotaping of a television broadcast despite strong opposition from the entertainment industry. The Betamax case also added the phrase "substantial noninfringing uses" to the copyright law lexicon. The court agreed that some people were using their VCRs to pirate movies but decided that the technology could not be blamed since its primary function was legitimate and met a consumer demand for time-shifting of programs.

In a document on its Web site, the Electronic Frontiers Foundation states its concerns for the future of fair use: "While stopping copyright infringement is an important policy objective, (the DMCA) throws out the baby of fair use with the bath water of digital piracy. ... Copyright owners can unilaterally eliminate fair use, rewriting the copyright bargain developed by Congress and the courts over more than a century." It goes on to cite the advent of copy-protected CDs as a prime example of "the collision between fair use and the DMCA" since they restrict how consumers can enjoy music they legitimately purchased.

apster (which shares only a brand name with Roxio's new, completely legal service) used that logic as its defense when the RIAA successfully sued it in 1999. The music industry claimed that unlike the Betamax case, Napster participated in the infringing: It was created solely for copying CDs without permission, the downturn in music sales was caused by such copying, and the company could filter out copyrighted material if it wanted to. The court agreed.

Indeed, most of the judicial rulings to date have gone in the industry's favor. But showbiz was dealt a setback in April in a federal judge's ruling on a lawsuit filed by the RIAA and the MPAA against file-swapping services Grokster, Streamcast Networks' Morpheus, and Sharman Networks' Kazaa.

U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Wilson decided that Grokster and Morpheus had no control over how they were used and therefore could not be held liable for its customers doing illegal things with the technology. (Kazaa was not affected by the ruling).

The entertainment industry's appeal against the Grokster ruling has not yet been heard but has already caused the RIAA to change its tack. The court had virtually said that the industry's only recourse was to sue individual users -- and on April 3, it did. The first to be sued in federal court for direct and contributory copyright infringement were for East Coast college students: Daniel Peng, a sophomore at Princeton University; Jesse Jordan, a freshman at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Aaron Sherman, a senior at RPI; and Joseph Nievelt, a junior at Michigan Technological University.

All four settled out of court within the month for amounts ranging from $12,000 and $17,500 each, but without admission of wrongdoing. Members of the public immediately began sending donations. On June 22, Jordan put a notice on his Web site asking people to stop, after the amount he received reached $12,005.67. As of last month, Peng had received donations totaling more than two-thirds of his settlement debt.

The RIAA maintains that it is taking the extraordinary step of suing college students and other individuals to send a message about the illegality of music downloading.

"It is critical that this industry do what it can to get the message out. If it requires legal action against individuals, then so be it," Bainwol said. The aggressive campaign hasn't been without PR risks for the lobbying group.

On Sept. 8, the RIAA cited an additional 261 individuals for copyright violations. On that list were Brianna LaHara, a 12-year-old honor student living in a New York government-assisted housing development, and Durwood Pickle, 71-year-old Texan who let his grandchildren use the computer when they visited. The legal action was dropped against Sarah Ward, a 65-year-old educator and sculptor, when it became known that only Mac computers were in her home -- Macs cannot use Kazaa, the peer-to-peer program the RIAA said Ward used to illegally download music.

More recently, software engineer Ross Plank became the second public assertion that the RIAA had targeted the wrong person. He said the RIAA has the wrong IP address (an online computer's unique identifier), he doesn't have file sharing software anywhere on his wireless network, and he had never even heard of most of the Spanish-language music artists the subpoena said he downloaded.

"There was an understanding that there were going to be cases that would provoke sympathy," Bainwol said. "But the critical bottom line is that when you aggregate millions and millions of people, who, however innocently, are downloading, you end up producing a marketplace environment that is devastating to the jobs of clerks, songwriters, artists and even people who work in record companies."

The Internet service providers have their own reasons to be concerned over these RIAA lawsuits, too. Verizon Communications refused to disclose the identities of its customers accused of piracy, as requested by the RIAA, until ordered to do so by a federal judge in January. SBC Communications and Pacific Bell Internet Services have also taken up the fight.

The telephone companies challenged Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a provision that created a streamlined subpoena procedure. Verizon said that it did not apply to ISPs that are not hosting potentially infringing material on their own servers. More than a dozen amicus briefs had been filed arguing that Section 512 of the DMCA is unconstitutional, saying that it gave copyright owners the ability to violate protected, anonymous speech.

The recording industry commenced its second round of legal action against individuals last week, when it sent a warning letter notifying more than 200 people that they could be sued for stealing music. Those letters fulfilled a promise Bainwol made to Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., during a Senate hearing examining the association's use of the lawsuits and the controversial DMCA subpoena process.

DMCA critics maintain that the right to be presumed innocent, the right to remain anonymous while engaging in lawful activities and the right to due process all are under threat.

"Though the copyright industries generate enormous wealth for our economy and clearly have the right to vigorously enforce their copyrights, that right is insufficient to justify, without prior judicial review, an invasion of our fundamental personal liberties," attorney Ballard says.