The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on Friday confirmed that it will abandon its practice of suing individuals for online piracy in favor of working with Internet service providers to track down offenders.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on Friday confirmed that it will abandon its practice of suing individuals for online piracy in favor of working with Internet service providers to track down offenders.

The RIAA is partnering with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and several undisclosed ISPs in order to alert the ISPs rather than the individual customer when it finds people who are swapping pirated tracks online.

This tactic has been used for some time now by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

Cuomo will encourage ISPs to participate in this voluntary effort, which will be executed via a graduated response. Instead of the RIAA sending lawsuits directly to consumers, the RIAA would notify the ISPs, who would then contact their customers.

People who ignore the warnings from their ISPs could be subject to a slowdown in service or loss of service completely, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the story Friday morning.

In exchange for this voluntary system, record companies have agreed to stop suing individuals for thousands of dollars per download, a system that has resulted in RIAA lawsuits against everyone from teenagers to unwitting grandmothers. The RIAA will also stop longer sent pre-litigation letters to colleges and filing "John Doe" lawsuits.

Pending lawsuits, however, will continue, and record companies have the right to sue those individuals who ignore the warnings from their ISPs.

Washington-based interest group Public Knowledge praised the plan, but expressed concern about consumers losing service and possible invasions of privacy.

Public Knowledge has "no objections" to the RIAA working with ISPs, but "we want to make certain that customers are not cut off from their Internet service or have their service altered solely on the basis of a claim by a copyright holder that file sharing is taking place," Public Knowledge president and co-founder Gigi Sohn said in a statement.

Sohn also said that "any arrangements between RIAA and the ISPs should not involve the invasion of customer privacy through the filtering of Internet content. The public deserves to know more about these processes before they are put into place."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said the move was "long overdue" but also had some concerns.

"The recording industry will continue to press the thousands of pending lawsuits, presumably pushing for the usual four figure settlements," EFF senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann wrote in a blog post. "How is it going to feel to be the last college student to settle in a fight that the recording industry has now admitted isn't worth the candle?"

EFF also speculated that the graduated response would result in more music fans being "harrassed" by the RIAA.

"The problem is the lack of due process for those accused," von Lohmann wrote. "In a world where hundreds of thousands (or millions) of copyright infringement allegations are automatically generated and delivered to ISPs, mistakes are going to be made."

Arts+Labs, a partnership between the Songwriters Guild of America and several leading technology and entertainment companies, praised the RIAA deal as "creative, positive and collaborative" approach.

"Experience has shown that most consumers will respond positively and switch to legal alternatives for future content downloads when they are informed that their downloading activities are inappropriate and that other easy-to-use, legal sources are widely available," the group said in a statement.

Editor's Note: This story was updated at 4:45pm Eastern time with comments from EFF and Arts+Labs.