In Sydney
on Monday, the
Associated Press reports that an Australian court has ruled against Kazaa saying the they provide a method for their users to breach copyrights by sharing music tracks over the Internet. In addition, the court has ordered the company to revamp it's software in the next 2 months.
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The 10 defendants in the case included Kazaa's owners, Sharman Networks Ltd., and Sharman's Sydney-based chief executive officer, Nikki Hemming, as well as Altnet, a company that provided some of the software for the Kazaa network. Federal Court Judge Murray Wilcox found six of them, including Hemming, Sharman Networks Ltd. and Altnet, infringed copyright and ordered them to pay 90 percent of the record industry's costs in the case. A hearing will be held later to establish damages. "These people have crowed for years about the downloads - 270 million downloads of somebody else's work each month," said Speck. "We will ask the court when it comes to damages to reflect the value of the music these people ripped off." Wilcox said that despite posting warnings on its Web site urging Kazaa users not to swap copyrighted material, "it has long been obvious that those measures are ineffective to prevent, or even substantially to curtail, copyright infringements by users." He added that Kazaa's owners took no action to rein in the illegal activity. |
Sharman Networks defense was that they could not control what end users did with the software.
Source: My Way AP News
