Industry experts are watching the Kazaa case in Australia because it marks the first time that the major recording labels have gone on the attack against piracy outside of the United States.
 Australian peer-to-peer file sharers woke up Monday to find access to the Kazaa Web site blocked to new users. In an effort to comply with court orders from Australia’s Federal Court, Sharman Networks cut off access to new client downloads.Users who try to download Kazaa’s software — which is used to share both copyrighted and unrestricted music and video files — instead find a notice that reads: “The download of the Kazaa Media Desktop by users in Australia is not permitted.”Meanwhile, current users who open the application from their desktop receive the following warning: “Attention users in Australia: To comply with order of the Federal Court of Australia, pending an appeal in February 2006, use of the Kazaa Media Desktop is not permitted by persons in Australia. If you are in Australia, you must not download or use the Kazaa Media Desktop.”Sharman spokesperson Julie Fenwick said the company is working toward compliance with the court.Federal Court judge Murray Wilcox gave the company until next week to comply with the order, but industry watchers expect the site to remain unavailable to Australians until the Federal Court of Australia decides on an appeal filed by Sharman.Strategy ShiftThe court orders followed a civil lawsuit filed by some 30 music labels accusing Sharman and associated parties of authorizing Kazaa users to breach copyright. The court ordered Sharman to install a keyword-filtering system by November 5 that would prevent copyright infringement in Kazaa’s software. The deadline was later extended until December 5.The filtering system contains some 3,000 keywords that include the names of many of the most popular recording artists. Users who conduct searches with those keywords would be blocked from downloading the files by the filter.Industry experts are watching the case in Australia because it marks the first time that the major recording labels have gone on the attack against piracy outside of the United States. According to Frost & Sullivan analyst Jarad Carleton, the record companies are focusing on the biggest companies they can to reinforce their message that stealing music is not acceptable.”It also has the effect of shutting down a service in a similar fashion to what occurred with Napster a couple of years ago and that has the potential to be good for record industry revenues,” said Carleton.Learning from MythologyCarleton believes that the record companies — as well as movie companies and other content producers — will never completely overcome the file-sharing problem. Carleton likens file-sharing services to the mythic Hydra, a monster with multiple heads that, when cut off, can regenerate and multiply. |
