KaZaA BV operates exactly the type of service which the music
and movie industries feared most in the wake of Napster. With
Napster, users of the service had to visit the Napster site to find
and access the music files which were available on the computers of
other Napster users. Its opponents knew that by getting a court
order to shut down Napster’s server, the swapping could not
continue. Unlike Napster, KaZaA and similar services are
decentralised, meaning that there is no server which can be shut
down to stop them. They also enable the sharing of various file
types, not just MP3 files.
Once users have downloaded the free peer-to-peer (P2P) software
from the KaZaA site, they do not need KaZaA to continue operating.
Accordingly, the company has argued that it has no idea who its
users are or what files they are swapping. The software has to date
been downloaded 20 million times.
The US music and movie industries' representatives, the RIAA and
MPAA, do not believe that the users are untraceable. The RIAA has
sued KaZaA in the US in a lawsuit which also targets similar
services, Grokster and MusicCity. All three services offer users
the same P2P software from a Dutch company called FastTrack. The
RIAA believes that the software does maintain a user database.
The owner of both KaZaA and FastTrack is Niklas Zennstrom of
Sweden. The popularity of his software is evidenced by its use on
the KaZaa, Grokster and MusicCity services to swap 1.81 billion
files in October alone, according to research firm Webnoize.
The case against KaZaA was brought by Holland’s music publishing
body, Buma/Stemra. Perhaps acknowledging the difficulty of shutting
down the network, the Dutch judge on Thursday also ordered KaZaA to
enter into licensing negotiations with Buma/Stemra. KaZaA’s lawyer,
Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm, told news agency Reuters that he hoped
the negotiations would render the main part of the verdict
irrelevant. He also considers it ambiguous. He told the Wall Street
Journal:
"The ruling is not clear. We don't know
whether we have to visit our users to erase our software from their
hard disks or whether we have to post a warning on our web site.
Besides, we don't know if this ruling is world-wide or only applies
to the Netherlands."
If negotiations fail and file swapping is not halted by 13th
December, KaZaA faces the daily fines up to a maximum of two
million Guilders (£570,000).
