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Kazaa Owners Risk Jail
An anonymous reader writes "There's been a twist in the Sharman Networks vs record labels case in Australia. Lawyers for the music industry now claim that Sharman's attempt to block Australian IP addresses from accessing the Kazaa website doesn't comply with a court order. As such, they want Kazaa masterminds Nikki Hemming and Kevin Bermeister to go to jail term. The saga began in Feb 2004 and ZDNet Australia has a complete timeline."
I'm surprised the movie industry doesn't just have them shot and be done with it, it'd be cheaper in the long term and the relative evilness of the act wouldn't impact there current evilness quotient too much.
Time to put the CEO of Xerox in jail too, I guess. Oh, and Sony, for their VCRs. And DVD-RW drives. And Microsoft, because Kazaa runs on Windows. Oh, and the Intel CEO too, because Windows runs on Intel processors. And don't forget Maxtor's CEO, because the files are written to a hard drive.
What happened to putting the actual people who commit crimes in prison? Oh, wait, it's much easier to target the gun maker...
Australians "risk" jail? Australia was jail!
As such, they want Kazaa masterminds Nikki Hemming and Kevin Bermeister to go to jail term.
Actually, they want no such thing.
From the article:
Counsel for the record industry, Tony Bannon, said his side "didn't want" an imprisonment outcome, but argued that Sharman had failed to comply with the order.
If the media cartels get their way everyone's going to jail.
Why don't we have done with it and implement the final solution. Turn the whole planet into a jail.
The Record Company execs will of course have to be ejected into space.
I don't see the contempt of court here.
Court - "Fix your software to meet our requirements for our market."
Kazaa - "Nah, we'll just pull out of your market, no infringement, no issue."
Court - "Uh... like, no, you have to offer software to us so we can impose requirements on it, cause, ummm..."
Austrailian RIAA - "Yeah, cause we loose if we don't have someone to blame for 'lower profits!'"
Court - "Thats not quite right, shut up you!"
I think the Austrialians need to go after those guys who invented File Transfer Protocal..
You are trying to be funny, but the US music industry really did try to shut down ftp (successfully) by taking down the Archie index servers. The funny thing is, at the time I wasn't even aware that ftp could be used en masse for distributing music without a license; the Archie index servers were useful in general. This means the music industry will have no remorse to take the entire internet down with them if they expect to maintain their profit margins. You may not even remember Archie because it was killed by the music industry.I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
That's unfortunate, because if they do get prosecuted and jailed over anything, the record companies doing the prosecuting are not going to be crowing about jailing a spyware manufacturer. They'll be celebrating the jailing of the developers of a peer-to-peer software client that we both know has non-infringing uses.
And the message they're sending out won't be that "spyware is bad," it'll be that "file sharing is bad." (Optionally insert a ", mmmmmkay?" after each for the full effect.) Between the two, which do you really think will be chilled if this prosecution goes through?
As fallacious as the whole "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" meme may be, this may be an occasion to let it slide. Should they be jailed? Probably, but let it at least be for the right reason, and let it send the right message.
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