IP Democracy: Australian Judge Slams P2P Barn Door Shut

As technology evolves in ever-shortening cycles, lawmakers and judges are hard-pressed to effectively keep up with the changes. Recent case in point: Australian Justice Murray Wilcox ordered the owner of P2P file-sharing service Kazaa, Sharman Networks, to block a list of search terms, mostly artists’ names and song titles supplied by record companies, from its service.

As Techdirt points out, this is the same prohibition that was applied to Napster in 2001, to no effect. All that keyword blocking did with Napster was force users to misspell artist and song names and the trading continued unabated.

The judge has also ordered Sharman to release a new Kazaa software platform that includes a non-optional keyword filter to weed out the blocked terms. But there’s another hitch: only users that download the new Kazaa software will have the built-in filter and the press is already warning folks not to download the new filter.

But the judge already thought of that. Here’s techdirt’s take:

The judge’s solution? Sharman is expected “to place maximum pressure on KMD [Kazaa Media Desktop] users to obtain the updated release.” Yes, that’s right. To convince people to download the crippled versions of Kazaa, Kazaa is supposed to “place maximum pressure” on current users (i.e., trick them) to download the crippled version, replacing the fully functional version.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on November 28, 2005 1:49 PM to IP Democracy