p2pnet - rss feed: Victory for Kazaa
The Dutch Supreme Court has ruled Kazaa’s developers can’t be held liable for the way people use their software.
It rejected demands by Buma Stemra, the Dutch royalties collection society, that distribution of Kazaa should stop and that future versions should be modified so copyrighted materials can’t be exchanged over the network, lawyers representing Kazaa say according to a Reuters story here.
But maybe the decision won’t, after all, have as much impact as expected. Sharman Networks, Kazaa’s owner, is currently involved in an all-out attempt to persuade the entertainment industry that it could actually work with the labels.
As part of Sharman’s bid for legitimacy and credibility, the Distributed Computing Industry Association, with Sharman and its alter-ego Altnet as its effective owners, wants p2p users to pay a flat fee, "to compensate musicians and record labels whose songs they download".
In the meanwhile, "This is a historic victory for the Internet and consumers," Niklas Zennstroem and Janus Friis, the founders of Kazaa, were quoted as saying in the Reuters report.
"The Dutch ruling - the highest European court yet to rule on file-sharing software - means that the developers of the software cannot be held liable for how individuals use it," it says. "It does not address issues over individuals’ use of such networks."
The court upheld a March 2002 ruling in which an appeals court ruled in favour of Fasttrack, the Amsterdam-based firm that developed Kazaa. Fasttrack later sold the technology to Sharman Networks of Australia.
