Australian Assault on Kazaa Continues

More on Australian Kazaa raids begun last Friday:

The man behind the raid is Michael Speck, the head of ARIA’s Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) unit.

“We started an investigation six months ago and it was based on technical and physical changes in the infrastructure of Kazaa,” Speck said.

….Although Kazaa has been based in Sydney for the last three years, it was only recently after internal changes that the company was recognised legally as an Australian operation.

“Essentially there were physical changes to the resources and technical changes of the software that make it clear that what the Kazaa operation is doing is clear-cut infringement of copyright in Australia,” Speck said.

….”It was a civil raid by way of Anton Pilar orders” Speck said.

“What they are is the civil equivalent of a search warrant. On Thursday we went to the Federal court and we applied for orders to attend premises, to obtain documentary and electronic evidence that related to the Kazaa operation. To do that, you have to show the court you have a case and a fear about the dissipation of evidence before the orders are issued.

“When the orders are issued they are on a very restricted basis. You are obliged to take an independent lawyer who reports directly to the court about the conduct of the search or any search process and also about what was located and taken. On the team is also a music industry lawyer, a music industry investigator and a computer forensics expert. By way of context, when you do these, you don’t actually take anything away. You copy it. We started at about 8am and the very last group of investigators left the offices of Kazaa in the early hours of Saturday morning.” [Sydney Morning Herald]

Meanwhile, Sharman says the filtering for copyrighted material that the record industry wants them to do is impossible:

“the Kazaa application is not able to monitor files that users of the software exchange with each other,” said Sharman Networks in a statement to ZDNet Australia . “Kazaa has a fully decentralised architecture, which allows users to share material directly with each other. This is what gives P2P, or distributed computing, its unique efficiency. Users of the software are responsible for ensuring that when they share material, they respect copyrights, just as are users of email, photocopying machines, CD burners, and a raft of other copying technologies.”

….”Sharman has reviewed suggestions from other parties on filtering technology for peer-to-peer software, and in simplistic terms, they are analogous to asking book authors to keep track of every single copy of their works made with photocopying machines around the world. Or, to put it another way, asking Microsoft to monitor the contents of every single email attachment individuals send to each other globally.” [ZDNet UK]