Here's an interesting one. The music industry in Australia is suing one Stephen Cooper over his website mp3s4free. The country's Music Industry Piracy Investigations reckon the site illegally shared 1.965 terabytes of music - drawing on stats that prove his site received 191,296,511 hits between Nov 2002 and Oct 2003, attracting 7,081,899 unique users. The industry body says Cooper "made it his business to distribute for free commercial sound recordings in MP3 formatî, adding that he profited from the activity by selling advertising on the site.
However, Cooper claims that his site merely contained links to other websites where people could download music. While many of those links may have gone to illegal sources of music, he claims no music files were actually downloaded from the site itself.
The MIPI is yet to respond to that defense. If they accept that mp3s4free was just a portal, but continue with their action, we will be in very interesting territory - Cooper's people are sure to ask how his site is any different than Google, Yahoo and any other search engine who will provide you with a list of illegal download sites if you type 'free MP3s' into a search field.
More on that when we get it.