AUSTRALIAN COURT SLAPS KAZAA

An Australian court has upheld complaints brought by the music industry over Sharman Networks and its Kazaa software, triggering a new round of legal hearings in which damages payable to the record companies will be decided.

Judge Murray Wilcox found that Sharman wilfully led people to steal stuff using the Kazaa network:

Sharman "long known that the Kazaa system is widely used for the sharing of copyright files".

He went on to say that the effect of the Kazaa website was "to encourage visitors to think it 'cool' to defy the record companies by ignoring copyright constraints".

"The respondents authorised users to infringe the applicants' copyright in their sound recordings," said the judge.

Being in Australia, the music industry brought on their spinners:



"Today's judgement shows that Kazaa, one of the biggest engines of copyright theft and the biggest brand in music piracy worldwide, is illegal," said John Kennedy, chairman of the International Federation of Phonographic Industries.

"This is a milestone in the fight against internet piracy worldwide."

A milestone, of course, is an apt metaphor - an obsolete staging-post often found on the side of a road that is no longer a primary route. The filesharers have long since moved on to eDonkey and Bittorrent, leaving the music industry pouring millions into pursuing a system that's long since stopped offering them any real threat.

The other thing to note is that the judgement doesn't say Kazaa is illegal at all - it states that Sharman did nothing to prevent, and actively encouraged, copyright-breaching uses of Kazaa, which is not even a subtle difference. Indeed, in the summary of the judgement, Judge Wilcox states that he won't call for the closure of the system, providing they pull themselves into line on the copyright issue:

However, I have had to bear in mind the possibility that, even with the best will in the world, the respondents probably cannot totally prevent copyright infringement by users. I am anxious not to make an order which the respondents are not able to obey, except at the unacceptable cost of preventing the sharing even of files which do not infringe the applicants’ copyright. There needs to be an opportunity for the relevant respondents to modify the Kazaa system in a targeted way, so as to protect the applicants’ copyright interests (as far as possible) but without unnecessarily intruding on others’ freedom of speech and communication. The evidence about keyword filtering and gold file flood filtering, indicates how this might be done. It should be provided that the injunctive order will be satisfied if the respondents take either of these steps. The steps, in my judgment, are available to the respondents and likely significantly, though perhaps not totally, to protect the applicants’ copyrights.

... in other words, Kazaa, in direct contradiction of John Kennedy's claim, is not, in itself, illegal.

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