Now this is more than just a little scary in my point of view, because I have many friends who still work in the Web hosting world. It has been a notion out there for some time now, can Web hosting companies be brought into the whole P2P file sharing battle? Looks like in one case in Australia, they sure can.

According to P2Pnet, Australian web hosting provider Swiftel is being sued by Warner Music Australia after 2 systems administrators, Melissa Ong and Ryan Briggs, allegedly set up a file sharing hub for the BitTorrent P2P file sharing with thousands of copyrighted audio and video files. Justice Catherine Branson overturned a prior ruling allowing the court case to go through.

While Swiftel’s liability in the case may be limited, the recent trend towards holding makers of P2P software and now web hosts liable for copyrighted file sharing highlights a disturbing fact for web hosting providers. Most hosting providers don’t know what content is being featured on the sites they host and should Swiftel be found guilty in the October trial this would open up the door for other web hosts to be sued for the content their customers are posting on their sites.

[Read the Rest of the Article at HostSearch.com!]

As said in the article, liability is going to be kind of hard to prove. Right now it sounds like these two system administrators did this without the knowledge of the company. What if it was a customer doing this though? Many Web hosts (after the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) put in their terms of service or acceptable use policy boundaries for what files can and can’t be on a server.

So are Web hosts going to have to act as “information police” going from Web hosting account to Web hosting account trying to figure out if you do have illegal material? What about your privacy? There are still a lot more questions than answers with this one.