Michael Speck, manager of Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI), who led the industry's investigation, said in ZDNet Australia that this is the first time the music industry has accused an ISP of being directly involved in piracy by allowing its network to be used for trading of copyright-infringing files.

"This case proves what the music industry has been saying about the Internet industry for many years, that music piracy is an integral part of the ISP business model," Speck told ZDNet. "If things don't change we'll be going after more ISPs.?

According to the report, the charges stem from an 11-month investigation into the Web site www.mp3s4free.net. The registrant of the domain name, Stephen Cooper, was also charged.

Speck said in the affidavit that the ISP benefited economically from the site, ZDNet reported. "In my experience investigating the revenue structure of Web sites such as mp3s4free.net the ISP hosting the Web site, stands to benefit economically from the increased consumption of bandwidth that would result from an increase in the flow of traffic to the Web site and an increase in the number of sound recordings downloaded by visitors to the Web site due to the large size of music files."

The site allegedly received 7 million unique visitors in the past 12 months.

In recent weeks, the U.S. music industry has taken the step of suing individual file swappers.