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It's war on a generation of cyber pirates

By Amanda Morgan
February 18 2003

The recording industry has launched its most aggressive offensive yet against illegal music swapping over the internet.

In the Federal Court in Sydney today, record companies will try to seize evidence of song swapping by students using the computer networks of the universities of Sydney, Melbourne and Tasmania.

Record labels in the United States and Europe have warned the world's top 1000 companies they must stop illegal music swapping on their networks or face legal action.

Australia's major record companies, Sony, EMI and Universal, are acting on suspicions that students, and possibly staff, are using the universities' computers to swap digital music files. The industry says the three universities have not divulged information, but that others have co-operated.

Michael Speck, the director of Music Industry Piracy Investigations, which tracks swapping on behalf of the Australian record industry, believes the illegal file trading is significant.

"And we're not talking about one track here, one track there," he said. "We're talking piracy, significant examples of piracy."

The University of Sydney says it knows of one student who established a website with a handful of songs for swapping on its system. It has "isolated the website, and will hand over the evidence at an appropriate time", a spokesman said.

There are hundreds of thousands of song files on personal computers worldwide. They are "swapped" for free using special software, robbing artists and their record companies of royalties.

But the president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, Cameron Murphy, said the industry was wrong to target students.

"The focus of these organisations should be on people who are running or pirating music for clear commercial benefit," he said. "I don't think there is any benefit to the community in prosecuting individuals who do this as a one-off. I mean, we'd have half the students in Australia in jail."

Mr Murphy also questioned whether the universities should be forced into the role of policing their students.

Mr Speck denied the industry was making an example of the universities. "Somebody gets caught being involved in a wrongdoing and they utter, 'We're not the only ones, why are we here?' Well, you got caught."




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