Hail to the thief: A tribute to Kazaa

This paper considers the ongoing litigation against the peer to peer network Kazaa. Record companies and Hollywood studios have faced jurisdictional and legal problems in suing this network for copyright infringement. As Wired Magazine observes: ’The servers are in Denmark. The software is in Estonia. The domain is registered Down Under, the corporation on a tiny island in the South Pacific. The users - 60 million of them - are everywhere around the world.' In frustration, copyright owners have launched copyright actions against intermediaries - like Internet Service Providers such as Verizon. They have also embarked on filing suits of individual users of file-sharing programs. In addition, copyright owners have called for domestic and international law reform in respect of digital copyright. The Senate Committee on Government Affairs in the United States Congress has reviewed the controversial use of subpoenas in suits against users of file-sharing peer to peer networks. The United States has encouraged other countries to adopt provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998 (US) in bilateral and regional free trade agreements.

Courting kazaa : judicial approaches towards P2P networks in the US and Australia

As with the litigation involving its predecessor Napster, cases involving the Australian based P2P service Kazaa and its US licensees Grokster and Morpheus required from the courts to balance the legitimate interests of the computer industry and the public in new and advanced technologies on the one hand and of so-called "content providers " of the media and entertainment industry on the other hand. The article examines, how US and Australian courts have approached this task and, in spite of differences in the legal frameworks of the two countries, have reached similar conclusions.