'World first' piracy case
2003-09-07 12:24
Sydney - Three Sydney men face jail after pleading guilty last week to breaking copyright laws in what the Australian recording industry believes is the world's first criminal prosecution for online music piracy.
Until now legal action against music websites such as Napster have relied on civil law and record industry representatives said the criminal case sent a powerful message that music piracy would face the full force of the law.
Tommy Le, 19, Peter Tran, 20, and Charles Kok Hau Ng, 20, last week pleaded guilty to infringing the copyright of music giants Universal Music, Sony, Warner, BMG , EMI and Festival Mushroom Records.
Police arrested the trio in April after raiding their homes in Sydney following a joint investigation with Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI), a record industry-funded watchdog.
They face up to five years' jail and A$60 500 in fines for illegally distributing up to A$60m worth of music on a website called "MP3 WMA land".
MIPI investigator Michael Speck said his organisation would ask the court to ensure the punishment meted out to the three reflected their crimes, although he declined to say whether this meant MIPI would push for a custodial sentence.
Speck told AFP it was believed to be the first criminal prosecution of its type in the world.
"This is an important copyright case for industries all over the world because it confirms the view that you can be found and you can be prosecuted even though you hide behind the anonymity that the Internet offers," Speck said.
"It shows courts are prepared to see this as just another form of illegal misappropriation of property. Hopefully that will send an incredibly strong deterrent message," he said.
Le, Tran and Kok Hau Ng will be sentenced on November 10.
Speck, a former detective with the New South Wales state police, said the case also showed police were now taking online copyright infringement as a serious crime.
"It's one from being perceived as a very low-level, almost innocuous, activity to being part of a portfolio of professional criminals," he said.
'Increasingly sophisticated'
"It's become increasingly sophisticated and the profits of pirates have skyrocketed."
MIPI estimates online piracy costs the Australian music industry up to A$200m in revenue every year.
Speck said the methods used to track down online pirates were improving and his organisation had a global monitoring system that could detect online infringement of Australian copyright no matter where it occurred.
"The sleuth work is becoming increasingly easy to do, it's almost impossible to wipe your fingerprints off a digital crime scene," he said.
Speck said the internet service providers who hosted music pirates websites could become the industry's next target.
"They're clearly not immune from prosecution," he said.
"They spend a great deal of their marketing effort exonerating themselves or distancing themselves from responsibility for this activity and increasingly courts are recognising the connection between this activity and their benefit," he said.
"They stay silent on their moral and legal position, they're clearly making a significant proportion of their gross revenue directly from the traffic of music."
Copyright lawyer Adam Simpson said the view of online pirates as teenage geeks operating from a back bedroom was outdated and organised crime was muscling into the area.
"There's certainly a lot of big organisations behind it," he said.
"I've had Asian clients threatened by gangsters from the Chinese mainland, using scare tactics to frighten legitimate licencees. Pirates is the right word for them."