"Citing claims by the owners of Kazaa, lawyer Tony Bannon, representing Australia's six major record labels, said the network has 100 million users worldwide who download three billion files each month.

Record company lawyers will use the civil case in Australia's federal court to try to have the owners of Kazaa declared liable for breach of copyright and loss of earnings. If they succeed, a case later next year would likely set the level of damages Kazaa's owners have to pay.

Kazaa's owners, Sharman Networks Ltd., will insist that while they urge users not to commit music piracy, they have no control over what people do with the popular "peer-to-peer" software they provide.

But at the start of a three-week trial in the federal court in Sydney, Bannon dismissed Sharman's defense, saying Kazaa's owners actively take steps allowing users to filter certain files from the network - such as those that could contain viruses or pornography - but not the files containing copyrighted songs.



With Kazaa, songs, movies and television programs are freely exchanged without paying royalties to the copyright owners.

The entertainment industry already has sued file-sharing services in the United States. Two federal courts in California have cleared Grokster Ltd. and StreamCast Networks Inc. of liability, though the industry has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Sharman is named in a similar suit whose ruling is pending in a lower court.

Analysts say the U.S. cases likely will not affect the Sydney trial, but all share the principle that a software developer is not directly responsible for the activities of its users, just as Xerox cannot be blamed for copying done on its machines.

Sharman's lawyers were expected to make their opening statement later Monday.

Kazaa already has one major court victory under its belt, with the Dutch Supreme Court ruling in December 2003 that Kazaa's Netherlands division cannot be held liable for copyright infringement.

A possible difference in the Australian case is the recording industry's invocation of a rarely used law that allows litigants in civil copyright cases to gather evidence. Investigators earlier this year seized evidence in a series of raids on companies and individuals linked to Kazaa.

Judge Murray Wilcox has rejected Sharman's efforts to throw out the seized evidence.

The case involves Australia's six major recording labels. Defendants include Sharman Networks, Sharman License Holdings and Sharman's Sydney-based chief executive officer, Nikki Hemming."

More from the article at
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/aptech_story.asp?category=1700&slug=Kazaa%20Trial

THE RIAA is an engine of THIEVES AND MANIPULATORS THAT ONLY CARE ABOUT MONEY to a degree of magnitude never before seen"

Also, if they think kazaa is bad, why don't they try looking at NEWSGROUPS, IRC CHAT, AND OTHER P2P software, like the emerging edonkey.

IRC and Newsgroups are not as popular. Kazaa (as much as a peice of shit it may be) is the most popular.

I'd have to agree with directive's analysis.

Hey - what do you know - my hometown paper, and my favorite, the Post-Intelligencer.

"It's a charade," Bannon said. "The respondents' motives are not altruistic. On the contrary, the respondents trade off the copyright infringing activities of (Kazaa's) users."

What an idiot. Bannon doesn't know what he's talking about. Innovation is not a charade.

"A possible difference in the Australian case is the recording industry's invocation of a rarely used law that allows litigants in civil copyright cases to gather evidence. Investigators earlier this year seized evidence in a series of raids on companies and individuals linked to Kazaa."

And what is with this law that allows them to seize evidence to use in this case? It's just wrong.

And another example of the industry using bad laws to persecute people, just like the RIAA uses the DMCA here in the States. These absurd laws need to be repealed immediately (as unlikely as that may be, it's something that needs to be done). And people like Orrin Hatch need to be voted out of office.

:-:~ Phantom

get ready for autralian regulatory regime called "new rules of the week", brought to you by the ARIA and an industry friendly court near you.

The basic structure? since you can be sued for "not doing enough" to prevent misuse of your: vcr, tv, web browser, router, network server, backbone, broadband service...
You have to implement whatever expensive and patronage destroying measures the industry wants there!

Even if Tony Bannon wins his case in Oz, it will ultimately be a pyrric victory, because then P2P owners will be more apt to locate in countries which have much more lax copyright laws.

The next Kazaa may emerge in Russia, China, or Vietnam. If that happens, I would like to see Tony boy try to win a big copyright infringement case in one of those countries.

awehr is right on. These suits will continue until a sympathetic judge is found or resources are dried up in defense, and the towel is thrown.

kazaa, grokster=adware central. why in the bloody blue hell would someone want to use these programs, anyway? put so much crap on a guy's computer that he has to do a complete wipe to get more than one of the damn things out of his system. this is after he has removed kazaa from his computer.

Someone should also hold Xerox and others of copyright infringement for manufacturing and selling document copy machines, and scanners. All of us are guilty for photo-copying from books and magazines.

"an engine of copyright piracy to a degree of magnitude never before seen"

...with the lone exception of the plaintiffs in this case -- the record labels, which require relinquishment of copyrights in exchange for promotion. Of course, their piracy is perfectly legal because they're all about the artists.

6 of them, huh? How appropriate.

"We don't want to shut down Kazaa, just its illegal activities," said Michael Speck, general manager of Music Industry Piracy Investigations, a body set up by major Australian record labels to target copyright infringers.

Just becuase it's "never before been seen" doesn't make it bad. It just means you're spewing propaganda via strong language and probably are full of crap.

And the RIAA is destroying culture to a degree never before seen. So there.

As usual the boy cried wolf two many times soon the village pays him no attention to him , This is how I see the RIAA and other affiliations of them you can only go around saying the sky's falling so many times before people roll their eyes and sigh and say whatever.

As usual it would seem the sky's falling all over the place when will people in power wake up to the fact is what they say is fluff propaganda geez not hard to see, but people in power only see greed as their primary color green and lots of it it all amounts to control.

how in the world did the ARIA get 100 million people from P2P?

The most I've seen at one time WORLDWIDE on Kazaa is 4 million. And even then if 300 billion files have been downloaded, how do WE know that they're all copyrighted files?

How do we teach this judge common sense?

Gnutella has online right now according to limewire, 980406 hosts, and they're still undercounting. Actually that figure as probably right. P2P has over 100 million users, just not all at the same time. At any given time, its more like 20,000,000 tops. And Orrin Hatch is out of office later this year. My senator Arlen Specter is trying to take his place on the judicary commity (sp?). Orrin Hatch has hit his term limit.

The ARIA is gonna lose if the EFF steps in to help like they did in the U.S. w/ Grokster and Streamcast.

"do WE know that they're all copyrighted files?"

Because everything is copyrighted at the moment of "fixation" regardless of whether a registration was ever turned in.

It is not a question of whether the material was copyrighted, but rather whether or not it was authorized for sharing.

Oh and by the way. You need a new Kazaa image. They have released 3.0 (still spyware run).

Orrin Hatch pisses me off, especially since he isn't all that far away from where I will live in the future. I wish there was a way we good get his dumb ass out of the senate, the guy is a moron.

could, not good, dur!