Users from several universities and government agencies, including the Department of Defence, Monash University, the US Department of Justice and Harvard University, accessed the controversial Web site mp3s4free.net last year, a witness said during a court case yesterday.
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Shane Pearson, an IT consultant, said in an affidavit lodged during the ongoing trial against the operators of the mp3s4free.net Web site and its Internet service provider, Comcen, that he was able to isolate a total of 214, 260 unique hosts within the access log file of the site during a 12 day period in October last year. The mp3s4free.net access log file contains records of the IP addresses or host names used by computers when accessing the Web site.
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"The access log file appears to be a log of information recording large numbers of computers accessing the www.mp3s4free.net Web site via the Internet. There are over 5 million separate entries in the file occurring within a period of only approximately 12 days (beginning with the entry on October 5, 2003 and ending with the entry on October 17, 2003)," Pearson said in his affidavit.
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Various institutions and government offices were identified during the process. A total of 64 hosts with suffix .gov and 40 hosts with the suffix .gov.au were recorded in the access log file as having accessed the mp3 Web site.