In the court case against Sharman Networks, Industry lawyers were aiming to prove that Sharman can control illegal use of its network. While Sharman claims that it cannot control illegal music trading, they certainly claim to be able to permanently bar pedophiles and their PCs from accessing the network. According to the Australian's lead legal advisor, if Sharman can stop this sort of activity, then they should be able to do the same for those involved in sharing copyright infringing songs.
According to Sharman Networks, their company is not in the position to start filtering copyrighted music from being transferred since their technology is incapable of accurately differentiating between legitimate music and that which infringes on copyright. They have also attempted keyword filtering, but the problem in this case is that the filters also block content that is legitimate to freely distribute that has matching keywords.
The major Australian record labels including Universal Music, EMI, Sony/BMG, Warner, Festival Mushroom and various other applicants are suing Sharman Networks and its affiliates accusing it of copyright infringement on music through its software Kazaa. The main focus now involves gathering usage patterns, determine if it is possible to reconfigure the software or network to track those involved in music copyright infringement and whether putting filters in place to block infringing music is indeed possible. GristyMcFisty submitted the following news via our news submit:
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Kazaa's porn policy states that it has a "no-tolerance policy with respect to child pornography and other obscene material" and that it has the right to "permanently bar" people and their computers from accessing Kazaa and other Kazaa services, Tony Bannon, the music industry's lead attorney, said during the second day of the Australian trial against the Kazaa file-sharing system. However, Sharman Networks counsel Anthony Meagher said the company is not in a position to filter the music being downloaded because the technology required is not sophisticated enough to discriminate sufficiently between licensed and unlicensed music. "There have been attempts to filter unlawful downloading of music, but it failed. The filter knocks out material which is lawful to exchange but contains any of the words being filtered," Meagher said in a Sydney courtroom. He told the court that filtering would also knock out other content that is not audio but contains similar keywords. The trial is one of the latest attempts of the music industry to shut down Kazaa. Read the full article here. |
As Kazaa has lost its leading position to eDonkey/Overnet about over a month ago, it looks like this lawsuit may turn out a waste of time if it only mainly affects Kazaa. Unlike other file sharing networks, Kazaa users have been the main target of lawsuits, targeted with fake files, monitoring and so on, which resulted in many former users and newbie's simply finding alternatives.
One interesting find the Australian music industry's legal advisor came across is the ability for the network to block pedophiles and their PCs, thus showing that with a little tweaking it could do the same with those involved with copyright infringement. Even if content filtering may not possible, even having the ability to at least block out individuals may still be one thing the music industry is interested in.
If the RIAA knew about PC blocking before the initial lawsuits on individuals and court cases against Kazaa, it would have been much simpler to trace IP addresses either manually or by automated software and updating the central blacklist database to block infringing users off the network. For example, it does not take much to develop some sort of script to scan the network every few minutes with the names of chart releases (and known alternative names) and automatically blacklist any host found sharing this content for a certain period or until the time of the next scan.
Feel free to discuss and find out more about Kazaa, its legal issues and alternative P2P networks on our Music Downloads, P2P & Legal Issues Forum.
Source: C|net News - Music
