Australian Mp3s4free piracy case goes to court

Quakester2000

October 27, 2004

DamnedIfIknow used our news submit to tell us that Lawyers for the
music industry's biggest players are claiming that Stephen Cooper received
millions of hits to his site Mp3s4free which provided illegal music content. The
retired police officer owned and maintained Mp3s4free from November 2002 to
October 2003.

The site was identified
by the
Music Industry Piracy
Investigations (MIPI) in 2002 and recorded a total of 191,296,511 (191 million)
hits to the site which equalled around 7,081,899 (7 Million) unique
visitors. The statistics also show that 2,109,964,514 kilobytes (2012 Gigabytes) of data was
downloaded from the site during this time.

However coopers defence
said he couldn't have abused copyright as all he had done was given hyperlinks
to sites that provided mp3's around the world. The defence went on to
point out that Google and many other search engines do the same, they provide
links not the content.

Lead counsel for the
music industry said the site acted as a shop for illegal music although none of
his customers paid for the music. Coopers site made all its money through
selling advertising space on the site. The links to free music were a way of
luring customers to the site to make money through advertising that relied on
site traffic. The music counsel said the site provided a Top 50 music chart
directory which provided music via hyperlinks to other remote computers which
when clicked were downloaded seamlessly to the site user.

The case continues
tomorrow.

Lawyers for music industry players claimed Stephen Cooper received "hundreds of millions of hits" per year to his allegedly illegal music download site, "mp3s4free", as the long-awaited court case against the retired policeman kicked off at the Federal Court in Sydney today.Music industry lawyers will allege the Web site was first identified in December 2002 after it was picked up by the MIPI"s Internet surveillance activities.

According to MIPI, usage statistics for
the Web site showed that between November 2002 and October 2003, it
recorded a total of 191,296,511 hits to the site, with 7,081,899 unique
visitors. The group"s statistics show 2,109,964,514 kilobytes of data were
downloaded from the site during this time, (one MP3 file ranges from
2,000-5,000KB in size).

However, lead counsel for the defence,
Anthony Morris QC, said Cooper could not have abused any copyright
material as "all he has done is put in a set of pointers to MP3 sites
around the world". "He has done nothing that Google or Yahoo hasn"t…he
provided a directory for certain types of content," Morris said. "He only
provided a hyperlink.

Lead counsel for Universal
Music and affiliated music label applicants John
Nicholas said the Web site acted as a
"shop" for the supply of unauthorised copies of sound recordings, although
"at Mr Cooper's shop, his customers did not have to pay for their music."
According to Nicholas, the site generated
money by offering advertising space. "The
music files made available at the Web site were the 'bait' used by Mr
Cooper to generate traffic that enabled him to make money from paid
advertising posted on the Web site proportionate to the traffic," he said.

According to Nicholas, Cooper's Web site provided an
"ARIA Top 50 Chart"-style directory that made available "copies of sound
recordings by means of hyperlinks…by which Internet users who visited the
site were given direct access to infringing files situated on remotely
located computer servers". "Those hyperlinks
on his site when activated resulted in music files being transmitted to Mr
Cooper's customer," he said. "So far as the user was concerned the
transaction was perfectly seamless."

The case resumes tomorrow.

As DamnedIfIknow pointed
out in his feedback you wonder if the whole "hyperlink" defense will work.
If it doesn"t, does the music industry go after Google and Yahoo next?

Source: Zdnet Australia