Australia Music Industry Decries Kazaa
SYDNEY, Australia — Lawyers for Australia’s recording industry branded the popular Kazaa file-swapping network "an engine of copyright piracy to a degree of magnitude never before seen" as they launched a court battle to shut down Kazaa’s illegal activities.
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.
Bannon said they all were seeking to get rich from advertising revenue based on the volume of traffic on the Kazaa network, while painting themselves as crusaders for music fans.
"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."
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