MIPI, Australia's Music Industry Piracy Investigation organization, first took notice of the site around this time last year.

According to MIPI, MP3s4free.net racked up some impressive traffic figures: 1.97 terabytes and 191,296,511 hits from November '02 to October '03. The org contends that the bulk of the traffic was illegal MP3s, though according to this writer's rough math, MIPI is way off base. You see, 1.97TB (where 1TB is 1024GB) is 2.166e12 bytes. Now, divide that by the number of hits and you get 11,322 bytes per hit, or 11KB. That is hardly enough to download an MP3 at an average size of 3MB.

"The distribution occurred on a massive scale, which was made possible by the power and reach of the Internet," says John Nicholas, lead council. "The scale of copyright infringement that occurred via the MP34free Web site is unprecedented in Australia for an Internet Web site of this kind."

Anthony Morris, Cooper's lead attorney, says that all Cooper did was link to files available on other websites.

"He has done nothing that Google or Yahoo hasn't… he provided a directory for certain types of content," Morris said. "He only provided a hyperlink."

The basic math shown above proves that there is no way, with those traffic figures, that MP3s4free.net could have distributed 191 million songs. At most he could have distributed 688,565 songs, and that ignores any traffic from the site itself. No, that's just not right. Average size of a webpage and included graphic files is easily 11KB, so the traffic figures quoted by MIPI firmly go against what they allege and pretty much prove Cooper innocent of all charges.

Thank you, come again.

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