Three students in Sydney have been convicted of swapping music files over the internet, in the first case of its kind in the world.
The students, Charles Kok Hau Ng (20) Peter Tran (19) and Tommy Le (21) pleaded guilty to 68 copyright infringement charges.
Ng and Tran were both given 18-month suspended sentences, while Ng and Le were also given 200 hours of community service.
The trio set up the MP3/ WMA Land website which had an archive of 390 CDs and 1 800 tracks to download.
Prosecutors said that seven-million people had visited the site, but were only able to turn up evidence of 58 music files distributed through it.
Ng’s lawyer, Chris Levingston, said the trio had made no financial gain and that the music industry had made no loss, although Australian police said the site could have cost the industry £24-million.
”This is a crime which is extremely common, relatively hard to detect, and with substantial penalties for people who engage in this activity. Ng was a scavenger, he was not a person who set out to break the back of the music industry,” Levingston said.
This is the first time individuals have been convicted of a criminal offence for internet music piracy, although there have been civil cases.
The arrests in April followed a joint police and Music Industry Piracy Investigations (Mipi) inquiry.
Mipi’s Michael Speck attacked the sentence outside Sydney’s Downing Centre local court. ”In the rest of the developed world you’re likely to get a sentence of between 24 and 36 months. Here you get a slap on the wrist.”
Australia has some of the toughest laws on file-swapping in the developed world. A court decision earlier this year granted record companies access to university computer networks to search for illegally copied music files. – Guardian Unlimited Â