Warner Music Australia and other record labels are suing the ISP for alleged copyright infringement by hosting and maintaining two servers (referred to as "Torrent Webpages") and a Web site called Archie's Hub -- which is claimed to deploy the BitTorrent application.
At a March 16 preliminary hearing in Sydney's Federal Magistrate Court, Perth-based Swiftel was ordered to surrender certain evidence previously unobtained through a civil search warrant.
But according to John Hennessy, the solicitor representing the music labels, only one log file -- on Archie's Hub's Web page -- was received. He also charged that the file had been "manipulated".
In a letter to Swiftel's solicitors Clayton Utz, the companies said: "Analysis of [the item] suggests that the data has not been provided in raw form. Instead it appears to be a text document that does not have all of the fields that ordinarily would have been recorded by the router. The data appears to be in respect to some net flow traffic from 24 February 2005 to 6 March 2005 only. It is incomplete. It stops several days before the execution of the orders."
Hennessy complained about the lack of response from Clayton Utz thereafter and told Federal Magistrate Rolf Driver that Swiftel was also asked to surrender the remaining [log] files.
However, Swiftel lawyer Stephen Burley SC argued that there was no traffic for a number of weeks prior to the raid, hence no additional log files were provided.
Driver previously ordered the respondents not to destroy or remove items that were relevant to the case and to keep the "offending sites" disabled and inaccessible to the public.
On March 10, the Music Industry Piracy Investigations unit raided Swiftel's premises in Perth in what is believed to be the first Australian assault on the use of BitTorrent technology for copyright infringement.
The hearing will continue tomorrow.
