Recently, Iced Earth guitarist/frontman Jon Schaffer disucussed the lawsuits filed by Century Media Records against over 7,000 people who allegedly shared and downloaded Dystopia illegally.Dystopia was the 2011 album by iced Earth and Dark Adrenaline was the most recent album by the Italian-based band, Lacuna Coil.

Schaffer says:

“It has come to my attention that Century Media is suing fans over illegal downloads of (among others) of our latest album, Dystopia. I felt it was important to clarify that we had no knowledge of this motion and were, sadly, not asked permission.”

He later added:

“We all know the music industry is changing. We have been adapting to this model by embracing legal streaming services such as Spotify and by bringing our music to places we have never played before by touring our proverbial asses off. As much as we respect that the labels are having a harder time selling music, we feel this is a misguided effort and want to make sure our fans know we would have not given out consent would we have been asked.”

In these illegal music sharing cases, a lawyer is hired to search for Internet protocol (IP) cases associated with downloading networks such as BitTorrent. Most people charged with illegal file-sharing will settle out of court for a couple thousand dolalrs instead of fighting the charges and risking Copyright Act fines that go up to $150,000 per downloaded song.