 In mid-1997, the RIAA took the recording industry's first collective legal action against online file-sharing of music, filing copyright infringement claims against the operators of three U.S.-based MP3 file-sharing sites.Each case could have resulted in a statutory damage award of over $1 million, but all three were settled out-of-court with permanent injunctions in January 1998.In 1998, the RIAA sued the operators of two more sites, resulting in permanent injunctions and monetary damage awards against the defendants, who were also required to perform community service.