Can you, a copyright holder, sue and win if a p2p program does not filter out your work, which you do not want distributed over p2p? This is the question that the courts have been struggling with. In Movies Studios vs. Grokster, the answer from the USA Supreme Court was yes. The problems with the Supreme Court decision is that it shuts down legal file sharing and does not stop infringement at all anyway. With a common browser you can still infringe all you want by using the “save as” menu option or by using the “Set as Wallpaper” mouse option on Internet Explorer. You will not even realize you are infringing and the vast majority of people do not even know what copyright infringent is and the Grokster solution does not adress these “people” issues. And the “people” are the owners of the country ans its Supreme Court (a fact not realized by judges). The judge in the case of this story, in Australia, seems to be on more logical footing that is more responsive to the people than the USA Supreme Court and simply wants a filtering solution so that copyrigthed music cannot be allowed to pass the p2p filter. The problem is that if the record companie’s proposed filter worked (and will not) it would only filter out some music files (that belong to big record companies) and not other music files and would not filter out any image, text and software files. It would only be a matter of time for various organizations (photographers, program developers and book publishers, for example) to ask for equal “protection” against sharing.

Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com

Kazaa: Fine, we’ll get rid of it.

ARIA: Oh Noes! Competition!

It was used as a means to begin the case with a search for evidence that would not have been granted otherwise. For years the cartels have tried to peel the onion of Sharman corporation to discover who to sue and who to hold responcible. If the base underlying evidence to proceed with the allowing of gaining all this information proves to be magic smoke and not reality then all the foo faw raw may be recognised by the court as such and future needs may well consider the means and methods that were used and then turned into smoke and snake oil.

Sharman said the 3000 word filter was what they could work with and come up with something that functions. Everyone knows that isn’t going to cover all copyrighted works. Not only that but no one can tell what is copyrighted and truely distinglish that from non copyrighted works other than the cartels. Even sites that attempt to give you some hint find that extremely hard to do and there are always entries that they just don’t know. Further the same named album produced in different countries carry different labels as to if it is not protected or if it is belonging to the cartels. Who knows if any entry under these conditions is or isn’t infringement? You certainly can’t tell from a description; even most descriptions fail to mention label or country so that a reader could be informed what not to touch.

Then the second part of the theme of the cartels may also hold sway. That of totally removing Sharman from being a viable business with the idea that they could own the whole sheebang if they can shut it down to where the cartels are the only ones interested in buying it. Done that way, they could have another p2p for a song in price (pun intended).