Court date set for Aussie BitTorrent case

According to the outgoing chief of Music Industry Piracy Investigations, Michael Speck, both parties were given an oral order by magistrate Rolf Driver to appear in the Federal Magistrates' Court this Wednesday, 16 March.

Driver issued a civil search order last week for the raid on the ISP in what MIPI says is the first Australian assault on the use of BitTorrent technology for copyright infringement.

The evidence gathered during last week's raid will be used for the copyright case this Wednesday. The MIPI investigation, which started since December last year, focused on two Internet Web servers known as the Torrent Web pages and a Web site known as Archie's Hub.

Speck said their investigation found that the Torrent Web pages and Archie's Hub were hosted on the Internet by a system whose domain names were listed as being owned by Swiftel Communications and Swiftel Pty Ltd.

The piracy investigations unit established that Swiftel Communications and Swiftel Broadband are wholly owned subsidiaries of People Telecom.

Speck said the BitTorrent case was a regulation example of MIPI's online anti-piracy efforts.

"This is the first BitTorrent case [in Australia] but it is no more than our normal Internet anti-piracy program. Whenever we identify facilitators of piracy online, they are likely to be target of our operations," Speck said.

He reiterated that the MIPI is "not interested with individual users" but are focused on the facilitators of copyright-infringing applications. Speck hinted that MIPI has already laid down several targets for future raids.

People Telecom chief executive officer Ryan O'Hare could not be reached for comment.