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: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...