GINA HARKELL was putting the final touches to her third CD when the full weight of the music industry came crashing through her letter box. “It was a legal document,” she recalls. “There were all these huge names — 14 of them — Universal, Polydor, EMI, Capitol, Virgin, Mercury, Sony . . . versus, well, me, my partner, but principally my son.”

A hundred miles away, at about the same time, Richard French, a respectable financial adviser, was calling his wife, Louise, with the news that he and his two young children had apparently been breaking the law for years, and they hadn’t even known it. If they wanted to keep out of the courts, he told her, they would have to pay £2,500.

In fact, all over the country on that day in mid-April, the opening of dull white envelopes elicited gasps of astonishment and despair among parents as they found out that they — usually because of their children — had become the first in Britain to be hit by a clampdown on internet music piracy. After losing sales amounting to some £300 million because of music-sharing software, the industry had decided it could take no more; there was no option but to use the courts.

And, in most cases, that meant pointing the finger at children.

It was a high risk strategy and, at the London headquarters of the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the body that represents record companies, executives were holding their breath. How, they wondered, would this one play with the media and among music fans?

Here we should hit the pause button and explain just what it was that these alleged internet pirates had been doing and why it was regarded as illegal. So far, around 90 defendants have been targeted. Most have settled with the BPI for sums averaging £2,000; the highest settlement was more than £4,000. The BPI is taking to court the first tranche of so-called pirates who wouldn’t settle. But why?

To fully understand, it is necessary to go back to 1999 when Shawn Fanning, an 18-year-old American student, released Napster, a computer software program that enabled people to swap digital music files.

Alarm bells instantly began ringing at US and British record companies. If these kids could obtain music simply by swapping among themselves, surely sales would drop? And they did, as hundreds of millions of files were swapped for free in breach of copyright law.

In the UK, filesharers were falling foul of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Under Section 16 of this Act, the “owner” of a piece of music is afforded exclusive rights to copy and communicate it to the public.

Section 20 says that communication to the public includes “the making available to the public of the work by electronic transmission in such a way that members of the public may access it from a place and at a time individually chosen by them”.

In other words, you and I cannot simply swap and spread around music that doesn’t belong to us without paying for it.

In 2001, Napster was forced to shut down after a US court ruled that copyrighted music was being traded on its network. The problems, however, weren’t over. New whizkids came on the block — KaZaA, Grokster, BearShare, Limewire, Gnutella, WinMX, and many more — with software that would allow people to share music files without going through a Napster-style central database. They called it peer-to-peer, or P2P, technology and, for the record companies, this was a nightmare. The technology wasn’t illegal, but the act of sharing it was. Now, the only way they could stop internet piracy was by going for individuals. And that doesn’t make for great PR.

For Gina Harkell, a London-based jazz singer described by Time Out magazine as “superbly talented”, the arrival of the BPI letter came as a huge shock. She had just finished recording The Bird in Me and was hoping to enhance her reputation as a singer and composer. But then she found out that her son Louis, now 19, had been caught using the family computer and KaZaA to download and share 1,330 songs with, the legal papers said, a potential 2,270,418 file-sharers around the world. Collectively, they were sharing 1,008,016,814 music files, amounting to a massive bootleg record collection.