GristyMcFisty and Quakester2000 used our news submit to tell us the wheels of justice have ground to a temporary halt in Australia, against Kazaa owners Sharman Networks. There are further legal delays due to the aggressive approach used during the seizure of documents last month. Australian Justice Wilcox has ordered that the seized documents be sorted under the management of an independent solicitor and a forensics expert in order that material that was not covered in the Anton Pillar search order is excluded.
 About the search process, the justice said: "I have the strong impression it wasn't done with the care and consideration you have described. I think it"s a bit of a mess." Sharman Networks had already applied unsuccessfully to delay proceedings while it appealed against the decision that rejected its claim that the court order for the search was invalid. Sharman has also declared that some of that seized information was privileged, highly confidential and copyright protected, as well as that a hard drive of its CTO was damaged during that raid. According to earlier reports the music industry will base its case on a clause in Australian copyright law that prohibits the communicating - defined as to "make available online or electronically transmit" - of copyright material. It is not absolutely clear which clause this refers to but it may be Section 43A of the Copyright Act of 1968. In this section, ISPs and others are allowed to make a temporary copy of a copyright work as part of the transmission to an end-user who is not in breach of copyright. If, on the other hand, the end-user might be in breach of copyright, the ISPs are not permitted to make that temporary copy. In other words the onus is on the ISPs to establish if end-user will be in breach of copyright if the file is copied. |
This law it seems would be tough to enforce and it would also be hard to determine who is in breach of copyright.
Source: The Inquirer
