Oz Kazaa court document online
p2p news / p2pnet: p2pnet has published, exclusively, a heavily restricted Australian Court document revealing why an Australian federal judge cancelled his earlier deadline compelling Sharman Networks’ to come up with a keyword filter for its Kazaa p2p application —– powered by words supplied by the Big Four Organized Music family.
The Big Four thought they’d scored a major victory when, in a landmark decision, Oz judge Murray Wilcox ordered Sharman to put the filter in hand by December 5,
It wouldn’t have done much to stop file sharing, but it would have amounted to a seal of approval for the RIAA’s (Recording Industry of America) Audible Magic ‘filter’ which, in 2004, had been personally touted through the US congress and in the media by RIAA boss Mitch Bainwol.
Instead, it turned into another PR catastrophe, thanks to Michael Williams, a lawyer acting for Big Four ‘trade’ group, the ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association).
Wilcox was “extremely angry” with Williams’ “treatment of a Federal Court official” overseeing a technical conference, Sharman says in a draft press statement obtained by p2pnet.
Williams had “shot himself in the foot” and showed “extreme” discourtesy to an Australian court officer by not turning up, says the transcript of the meeting when Wilcox told Organized Music its lawyer had fouled the water.
As a direct result, Kazaa won a reprieve until late February, “despite objections by the record companies,” says the hitherto unpublished Sharman press draft.
“The court also rejected, out of hand, an attempt by the record companies to obtain damages after their barrister indicated that he would be seeking $200 m [million],” it says.
Wilcox has ordered Sharman to release a new Kazaa with a compulsory filter loaded with 3,000 updateable keywords which would restrict users’ abilities to access music owned by the Big Four.
The cartel could change the list every 14 days and Sharman would have two days to comply with the changes.
Two “conclaves” were ordered so the number of words (the labels were demanding 10,000) and other details could be agreed by both parties.
Things appeared to be going well, despite the fact mention of Audible Magic had seemingly appeared out of nowhere, but the ARIA’s Williams apparently didn’t like the way the first meeting had gone. So he failed to turn up for the second.
For Sharman, QC John Ireland said Audible Magic would, “run everything through a black box and test it and decline to allow the transmission of peer-to-peer communications for any number of titles, but that was a major change to the architecture of the system which our people were ready to do to comply with “
But, “we get this email [from Williams] in effect saying I am not going to talk to you any more,” says Wilcox in the court transcript.
“I just can’t resist the thought that, yes, there is room for criticising the respondents, but Mr Williams shot himself in the foot.”
The Australian court document is a very long, and often obtuse, read, but it’s worth the effort.
Stay tuned.
Also read:-
heavily restricted – Big Music Kazaa blunder: II, November 26, 2005
Audible Magic – Audible Magic’s ’silver bullet’, July 13, 2004
personally touted – Vaunted RIAA p2p ‘filter’ software, June 2, 2004
November 28th, 2005 at 4:20 pm
The problem with the Audible Magic and/or a compulsory filter loaded with 3,000 updateable keywords are just toO many to allow ITS serious consideration as an effectiveness filter.
The main problem with the filter being talked about is that only music recordings would be filtered. The authors of musical scores (songwriters), midi files, images, text files, software, photographs, and independent recording artists, etc. will surely scream because their rights deserve the same protection as those of the large record companies whose recordings would ostensibly be filtered out.
Put differently, only a universal copyright filter will treat all author works equally and such a filter would be very hard or imposible to develop and implement and, if implemented, could halt the Internet to a crawl. A music only filter to protect the big record companies could be illegal because it does not provide EQUAL PROTECTION.
It would seem that Kazaa is letting the record industry dictate the filtering system so that when the filter fails to work or creates the legal EQUAL PROTECTION problem mentioned above, the blamees would be the record companies, whould would then be forced to come up with another impossible to find alternative or give up.
What an irony. The large records companies, who create nothing but market the creation of others want protection for themselves but not the people (their customers too!) and not the creators, the very same group that copyright laws started out to incentivate to produce more.
An interesting question here is, can the record companies be sued for participating or forcing KAZAA to implant of a filter without EQUAL PROTECTION for all authors?
No wonder the lawyer for the record companies “shot himself in the foot”. That may be better for his reputation.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com
November 28th, 2005 at 7:14 pm
The Dec 5th deadline is still in effect, as is the order to filter 3000 keywords. It’s all in the order, but apparently nobody here at p2pnet cares to look that order up …