International music provider Kazaa asked the Australian Federal Court on Tuesday to delay hearing alleged copyright breaches against it until a similar case in the United States is finished.
The hearing follows raids last week by five record labels on a dozen sites across the country to collect evidence against Kazaa, the world’s largest file sharing network.
Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI), owned by Universal, Festival Mushroom Records, EMI Music, Sony Music, Warner Music Australia and BMG Australia, conducted raids on three Australian universities and internet service providers after gaining the court’s permission.
Lawyers for Sharman Networks, which owns Kazaa, said the Australian case should not proceed until the Federal Court of Appeal in the US hands down its ruling on similar claims against Kazaa.
”These proceedings, if they are to go ahead at all, ought not to go ahead until the end of the American proceedings,” said counsel for Sharman Networks, Francis Douglas QC.
Outside the court, a lawyer involved in the US case said the music companies were just looking for another opportunity to sue Kazaa after losing hearings in the US and the Netherlands.
”Now that they’re losing in the United States they seek to come here and fight the same battle on Australian soil,” said lawyer David Casselman.
”What this is really about is destroying a distribution model that will out-compete them.”
Casselman said it was unfair to simultaneously target the same company in several legal jurisdictions.
Late last year, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled Kazaa was a legal operation and did not violate copyrights.
Kazaa was founded in the Netherlands, but the service was sold two years ago to Sharman Networks.
Since then several lawsuits have been brought in the US against companies offering Kazaa software.
Internet experts say Kazaa is different from Napster, the service which largely spawned music file sharing in the late 1990s. Napster, banned in 2002 by a US judge, based its activities on a central server, while Kazaa facilitates a connection between users on a peer-to-peer basis.
Napster has since been reborn as a legitimate industry-supported service, offering downloads of songs for US 99 cents via the internet.
The Australian hearing will resume on February 20 when the court is expected to give its decision on whether to grant an adjournment. – Sapa-AFP