Kazaa owner back for another bite at content conspiracy

GristyMcFisty used our news submit to tell us that the Major record labels are set to take Sharman Networks, which own Kazaa will be back in court a second time. Previously in January, the record labels did not offer enough evidence of harm from the defendants. This coming lawsuit is identical to that in January , but the labels prepared with more evidence. 

The purpose of this lawsuit is to drive peer-to-peer technology out of business. One problem the music labels may face is the issue of price fixing and having high control of the market, thus making competition very difficult. The record labels will argue against the original judge’s belief which was that the consumers where responsible for piracy and not the peer-to-peer networks itself.

File sharing network owner, Sharman Networks is set to give its private anti-trust action against the major record labels and Hollywood studios, another bash, after it failed to get a court to take it seriously last time, saying it didn’t offer evidence of harm from the defendants. Now it has come back with another suit, this time saying that it will name names, and places and meetings of when industry executives courted the company and how they then conspired to shut them out. The new suit is identical to the last one, filed in January, except for this provision of extra evidence. The purpose of the conspiracy is to drive peer to peer technology out of business, the suit claims. There must be, at some stage, a serious platform to investigate the cartel nature of the music companies, with common pricing and the film companies, both of which control their channel to market to the detriment of other competitors. In particular the existence of Movielink, owned by the studios (except Disney) and run for the studios (including Disney) as the most privileged of Video on Demand movie services. But chances are that the peer-to peer brigade, (Sharman networks now owns Kazaa) are perceived as far less trustworthy even than the comfortable establishment represented by studios and record labels, so perhaps this will not be the case that brings their relationships out into the open. The record labels are still suing Kazaa and Sharman Networks and go to appeal shortly, where they will argue against the first round judge’s belief that peer-to-peer networks are not in themselves responsible for piracy, their customers are.

I would agree with what the original Judge said. It is up to the consumer to decide if they want to make music available online. I do not see ISPs, network hardware companies and so on going to court, since they provide the connectivity for the users and it is up to the user to decide how to use their equipment. Finally, peer-to-peer networks existed long before even the days of even Napster. If you connect up two or more PCs to a hub on a common workgroup, then you have a peer-to-peer network with the ability to share files! Kazaa and most of the other file sharing applications work similar to Window’s built in file sharing, but work over a wide area network (Internet) rather than a local area network (single location).

Source: The Register