Overturning an earlier decision, an Australian federal court has ruled that two Swiftel sysadmins can be sued by the music industry for alleged music piracy.
The Perth based ISP has been accused of copyright infringement by major record labels who claim some of their employees and customers setup a BitTorrent hub which "hosted" thousands of pirated music files. The allegation that it actually hosted pirated files is strange considering that’s not usually how a BitTorrent site would act – it would host torrent files, not pirated files.
In fact, some people are claiming that the Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) claims are false and that it was a DC (Direct Connect) hub and had nothing to do with BitTorrent.
Nevertheless, sysadmins Melissa Ong and Ryan Briggs allegedly ignored attempted contact by the labels and "treated the warnings as spam". Back in April, magistrate Rolf Driver refused to allow the pair to be added as respondents, citing lack of evidence that they acted any way beyond the scope of their employment.
Justice Catherine Branson overturned the earlier decision on Friday however. "We'll be demonstrating that the company had knowledge of what was happening, and that these two individuals knew of this [piracy] activity," Tony Bannon, counsel for the labels, said.
However a lawyer for the IPS protested and claimed that only customers were responsible for the piracy. Branson ordered Swiftel to produce data backup records by July 8 and the trial is expected to start in October.
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