Parents are paying the price for their children's filesharing activities.

As the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) scales up its fight against people who download copyright music files, it said around a third of the internet account holders now facing legal action are thought to be parents whose accounts have been used to upload music illegally by their children.

Britain is widely regarded by the entertainment industry as one of the worst offenders for sharing copyright music and movies. But the UK arms of the entertainment industry such as the BPI and Motion Picture Association of America have not been as quick as the Americans to take legal action to stamp out the problem.

However after warnings fell on deaf ears, the BPI swung into action. The trade body has already settled cases with 26 people. It has a further 64 in its sights with probably more to come.

Of the 64, it has written to 31 people alleged to be illegal filesharers with details of its legal claims against them.In addition, it successfully won its case in the High Court yesteday to force internet service providers to hadn over the identities of another 33 people.

The ISPs concerned now have a fortnight to give the BPI the identities of the filesharers, which brings the number of people in the UK to face legal action for illegal filesharing up to 90. They will face claims for compensation and the legal costs in pursuing them; average fines in the UK have been around £2,200.

Users of the most popular sites such as KazAa and Morpheus have been the primary targets in the early stages of the battle. Now the lastest cases show people using file-sharing services such as Bearshare, Limewire, OpenNap, WinMX and Winny, DirectConnect, and BitTorrent are also no longer safe from the ire of the music world.

BPI General Counsel Geoff Taylor said: "This court order should remind every user of a peer-to-peer filesharing service in Britain that they are not anonymous. These 33 people will now face paying thousands of pounds in compensation.

"We are continuing to collect evidence every day against people who are still uploading music illegally, despite all the warnings we have given. If you want to avoid the risk of court action, stop filesharing and buy music legally".