Australian company sued for hosting MP3 site, or was it just a search engine?

"At no time did we host any illegal MP3 files or MP3 files
renamed as "gif" files on our server for mp3s4free.net," Liam Bal, a
director of ComCen, told ZDNet Australia. "The Web site was basically an
MP3 "search engine" that linked to other MP3 sites."

Bal said ComCen had been told by the lawyer for
the record companies, Michael Williams, that a Web site that linked to
other sites that hosted the MP3 files was involved in breach of copyright.
"Therefore we believe this might be a test case for the music industry
against search engines such as Yahoo.com.au, Anzwers and the like," said
Bal.

Bal also denied an assertion by the head of Music
Industry Piracy Investigations, Michael Speck, that Internet service
providers derived revenue from illegal filesharing.

"This statement cannot be true, as ISPs have to
pay for all data coming into their networks and get no revenue for
outgoing data, so it's in their interest not to host MP3 files," said
Bal.

Patrick Fair, from Baker & McKenzie Lawyers, a
member of the Internet Industry Association (IIA)), explained the IIA's
general position on whether ISPs should be held accountable for the
content hosted by them.

"[Suing ISPs because of content hosted on their
servers is] not reasonable to the extent that the ISP had no knowledge or
involvement in the activity of the relevant site," Fair told ZDNet
Australia . "The IIA believes ISPs shouldn't be obliged to make positive
enquiries as to what their clients are up to."

However, he conceded that providing unauthorised
copies of copyrighted material was breaking the law, and if
copyright-infringing material is brought to its attention, the ISP should
remove the site. The procedures to be followed will be laid out in the
soon-to-be-released Cybercrime Code of
Conduct.