In a few cases, the RIAA has backed off after realizing it had fingered an innocent party.

Music industry executives privately acknowledged that the Thomas verdict would do nothing to stem the tide of stealing. If anything, they said, such cases are a continuing distraction for the real task, which is to increase legal sales, especially online.

“You can’t stomp it out. People are going to get it one way or another,” said a senior executive at a major label who said he would be fired if his name were printed.

The industry is trying to preserve the sale of music in forms consumers are increasingly rejecting, such as CDs and digital tracks that come with restrictions on how many times they can be copied or on which devices they can be played.

“Eventually we will all have to go MP3,” said the executive, referring to the most common format of digital music. MP3s can be played on any device, and no software restricts it from being copied.

Universal Music Group and EMI Group began selling MP3 versions of their songs this year, and the others major labels are expected to follow by the end of 2008.

“I see more and more legal services these days,” said Karlheinz Brandenburg, one of the principal engineers who developed the MP3 format at a German consortium, the Fraunhofer Institute. “As the offerings get more active, the piracy will come down.”

In addition to selling MP3s and protected songs through Apple Inc.’s iTunes electronic store, the labels are making more deals to share advertising revenue with Web sites that feature their songs.

But the lawsuits, experts said, aren’t changing the marketplace.

“It’s not helping their cause. It’s like prosecuting marijuana users,” said Bob Lefsetz, who writes a music industry newsletter.

At best, Lefsetz said, the fear of being unlucky enough to be caught is deterring the casual user, who isn’t buying CDs anyway — just surfing online for what’s available free.

“They need to move to the future,” he said of the record companies, perhaps by pushing inexpensive subscriptions to digital catalogs.

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