Sharman Networks, raided last week by music industry pseudo-cops, says it can’t tell the difference between copyright-infringing and legitimate file-sharing on its network.

But it claims patented "top search technology" owned by partner Altnet allows it to monitor "DRM wrapped files that it makes available or sells to Kazaa users," says a ZDNet Australia story here.

However, "this in no way translates to an ability to track, identify and block any of the hundreds of millions of digital files created and exchanged directly by Kazaa users that are not wrapped with Altnet’s DRM technology."

Michael Speck, head of a Big Music’s Australian Music Industry Piracy Investigations, told ZDNet the issue was, "a simple case of copyright infringement, and that if Sharman Networks stopped allowing copyright-infringing files to be traded via Kazaa then the record companies would stop the lawsuit.

However, ‘the Kazaa application is not able to monitor files that users of the software exchange with each other,’ Sharman Ntold ZDNet Australia . ‘Kazaa has a fully decentralised architecture, which allows users to share material directly with each other. This is what gives P2P, or distributed computing, its unique efficiency.

" ‘Users of the software are responsible for ensuring that when they share material, they respect copyrights, just as are users of email, photocopying machines, CD burners, and a raft of other copying technologies’."

But, it’s, "very clear they are facilitating and authorising global copyright infringement," Speck is quoted as saying.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2004 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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