No one has really won the Kazaa victory

The Federal Court yesterday found Sharman, the Australian company behind Kazaa, had breached music copyright by authorising its users to swap songs illegally.

It gave Kazaa two months to include filters to prevent the trading of copyrighted music and tossed out record industry claims of contravention of the Trade Practices Act and conspiracy.

Sharman is confident that it can survive if it brings in technical changes to Kazaa to reduce the possibility of copyright violations, whether or not this will be enough to satisfy the Judge is another matter.

Also the Judge was very concerned that the ruling not interfere with the rights of people to legitimately file-share, which is not the same thing as ruling the technology as a pirates charter. This was what the Music industry wanted.

It is going to be tough, but not impossible for Kazaa to survive this round of court battles.

Meanwhile the Music Industry is pushing a PR offensive where parents are supposed to teach their children not file-share, as if it had a total victory.

At this point however, it could actually back-fire for them. Yaman Akdeniz, the director of Cyber-Rights and Cyber-Liberties, told the Grauniad that the judgment would simply increase the exodus of users to alternative file-sharing applications. Particularly if you put a successful copyright filter on it.

More here. µ