Illegal games downloaders targetted

Five of the biggest computer games manufacturers are launching a crackdown against thousands of British families who they accuse of having illegally downloaded software from file-sharing servers.

Atari, Topware Interactive, Reality Pump, Techland and Codemasters will serve notice on 25,000 people, demanding that they pay £300 or face the prospect of being taken to court.

The companies will then target any of the initial group who ignore their letters, and will launch mass actions against them. It is estimated that more than 6m download games illegally from the internet.

This week an unemployed mother of two became the firt person in the UK to be targetted in this way. Isabela Barwinska was ordered to pay damages of £16,000 to Topware Interactive for illegally downloading their game Dream Pinball.

With UK sales of computer games predicted to hit £2bn this year, the manufacturers are protecting their shares of an increasingly lucrative market. Some games are downloaded hundreds of thousands of times illegally - one, Battlefield 1942, was accessed by almost 1.5 million people.