Another court hearing on the remaining download sites, including the likes of Kazaa and Grokster, took place in LA yesterday following a weekend meeting of music and film companies. The Recording Industry Association of America, the National Music Publishers Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America want these sites to face similar action to Napster – claiming that site owners should safeguard against users exchanging copyright material.
But the people behind the likes of Kazaa claim that they simply supply the software that allows users to communicate and exchange files with other people – they don’t hold a Napster style database of the files being exchanged. Therefore they cannot be made responsible if their file exchange systems are used for illegitimate purposes any more than Adobe can be held responsible if people scan copyright pictures into their computer via Photoshop.
When Napster was at its peak some industry insiders pointed out that the next generation of file sharing technology would not rely on a central database of exchanged files, and therefore would be harder to control – some felt this was a reason for finding a compromise with Napster which was, in many ways, the lesser of two evils.
But with Napster crushed through the courts the major labels are hoping for a legal victory to help overcome the latest copyright threat. US courts are yet to decide if they have a case, though a Dutch judge wasn’t convinced ruling that a company was not responsible for what people did with its software.