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Once their respective ISPs have identified the 65 accused individuals, the BPI will seek an out of court settlement. To date it has settled with 70 sharers, some of whom have paid several thousand pounds, while a further five have refused to pay up and will go to court.

The new lawsuits are part of an international offensive across Europe, Asia and South America, including for the first time Sweden, Switzerland, Argentina, Hong Kong and Singapore. These bring the total number of countries where legal action has been taken to 17.

However neither the BPI nor the International Federation of Phonographic Industries is going so far as to claim that the lawsuits are having an effect on the level of p2p activity. In fact since the first lawsuits were file two years ago the number of p2p users has doubled.

Nonetheless BPI General Counsel insists that the lawsuits are having some impact. 'There is no doubt that legal action is helping to contain the spread of illegal filesharing,

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but there is sadly still no shortage of people who believe the law simply does not apply to them,' said general counsel Roz Groome

Her comments were echoed by John Kennedy, chairman of the IFPI. 'Thousands of people - mostly Internet-savvy men in their twenties or thirties - have learnt to their cost the legal and financial risks involved in file-sharing copyrighted music in large quantities,' he said. 'Some countries, such as Sweden, have to some extent been perceived as immune from the laws affecting everyone else - today we are making it clear that copyright laws will be enforced against illegal file-sharing in those countries just as elsewhere.'

However the music industry's tactics of asking the courts to order ISPs to reveal the names of alleged sharers has not proved a hit in the Netherlands, where a Utrecht court said that the MediaSentry software used to spy on p2p networks was unreliable and as a result not lawful.

The ruling said that software 'has no knowledge of the limitations of Kazaa in file searching' and makes no allowance for innacurate search results. It also makes no allowance for multi-peer downloading contamination: 'Therefore, it is difficult to establish the contribution of the various IP-addresses. It is possible that some IP-addresses contributed 0 Bytes to an actual download, thus there was only involvement and no actual contribution.'

The Netherlands is the second country after Canada to reject the claims against alleged file sharers who have been 'identified' using this software.

The BPI declined to say how they monitor p2p usage in the UK.