Kazaa Trial In Australia Underway

wadiwood writes "Five record companies are suing the makers of Kazaa. Sharman (moved to vanuatu in Feb 2004) say they are not responsible for what their users do with the software. Personally I don't get what Sony is doing selling MP3 players for all your "favourite tunes" and then selling music which they say you are not allowed to copy to their MP3 players, but that's another story."

Comments

Re:"I don't get what Sony is doing..."

[theparanoidcynic]

What is this "shift key" of which you speak? I'm breaking the law simply by using an OS that doesn't support their precious DRM system. All us *nix users (including those with that "mainstream" BSD-based Apple thing) are criminals for putting DRMed CDs in our computers without being willing or able to run their RIAA virus.

Re:Sigh. Is the idea of licensing so hard to grasp

[williamhb]

Except there is no Fair Use clause in Aussie copyright law. So they can't do this legally in Austrialia, hence why the submitter said this.

Yes, there is a Fair Use clause in Australian copyright law, it just isn't identical to the one in the US. (and unfortunately while it does cover photocopying parts of books, it doesn't cover copying music from one medium to another).

However, there is also case law, some of which may be helpful. One example was when an Australian cable network was sued by a free-to-air network because the cable network was rebroadcasting the free-to-air signal (including ads) over cable without permission. Seems like an obvious breach of copyright law - copying the entire network content. But the cable network won, partly on the grounds that they were rebroadcasting the signal to people who were already entitled to receive it, and the free-to-air network couldn't actually prove it had caused any financial loss to them.

As such, a law suit to stop someone copying their CDs to their own media player might prove difficult, despite it not being covered by fair use.

But your milage may vary and I am not a lawyer...

Re:First Post

[tambo]

Sony is a little mysterious that way! One would think it could recoup some music losses thru its hardware sales.

In fact, they're trying the opposite tactic. They have essentially missed the whole MP3 player market - entering the field late, and with a product that was both indistinguishable from a dozen also-rans and rendered lame by copyright restrictions. So they are endeavoring to propagate the "repeat media sale" model to these new devices. They sell you one copy of the CD for your home computer, another copy for your car, a third for your MP3 player...

This is perhaps the greatest threat of the P2P/open-media frontier: the big media gravy train is coming to an end, as the public realizes it should only have to buy content once.

- David Stein