"A Los Angeles federal judge will hear arguments Monday as to whether record companies and movie studios can sue the parent company of Kazaa, the most popular online file-swapping service, in the United States. Much of Kazaa's future, from a business and legal perspective, hangs on the judge's decision. The parent company, Sharman Networks, is headquartered in Australia and incorporated in the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu, and has tried to keep business contact with the United States to a minimum in order to decrease its legal risk." http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2126445,00.html
I notice that article fails to mention that the Kazaa/FastTrack network is actually based and owned by a company in the Netherlands. Sharman do not own the FastTrack protocol, just the client "KaZaA Media Desktop". Even if they do manage to sue, without central servers, can they shut it down without getting every ISP in the world to agree to block port 1214?
Judge backs case against Kazaa http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/2514153.stm So - another fight starts - although as Quack has pointed out, how can they shut the service down if there are no central servers?
To simply do what teh RIAA wants to do: Get into your computers, destroy all piracy (read: movies, music, games, etc whether legite or true piracy) and then destroy the software to share them and then resurect Hitler and make everyone ben over and accept it. Maybe they want to try and take on the protocol itself? But still, they'd need some kind of global patch or similar...... It seems the further we advance into the technological era, the more people want to tear it down and spit on it.
