SYDNEY, Australia -- If Napster's death is remembered as tragedy, Kazaa's death -- if and when it comes -- may well be remembered as farce.
So history repeats itself in the file-swapping wars: When lawsuits forced Napster to close down nearly five years ago, Kazaa brazenly took over as the file-swapping software of choice for millions of web users, and the digital music free-for-all didn't miss a beat.
Now, litigation is poised to put Kazaa out of business, following a ruling here Monday that closely mirrors the U.S. case that effectively closed the books on Napster.
Once again, a court stepped in to sharply limit a popular P2P network. And, once again, it appears that the demise of a file-swapping leader will have negligible impact on the file-trading phenomenon as a whole.
Successors such as BitTorrent and eDonkey have already upstaged Kazaa with a number of technical improvements and edged it out in terms of the volume of raw data that's exchanged on their respective networks, which feature large numbers of bulky video and software application files.
On Monday afternoon in the Australian federal court in Sydney, Justice Murray Wilcox ruled that Kazaa owner Sharman Networks authorized the infringement of copyright material. The music industry will now seek astronomical damages.
"We want the damages order to reflect the value of the music that was distributed," Australian music industry spokesman Michael Speck told Wired News. "We don't yet have a figure, but we expect it to be in the order of several billion dollars."
Wilcox further ordered the company to build a keyword filter, designed to stamp out infringing activity, into the software within two months. In another blow to the software maker, he also ruled Sharman must pay 90 percent of the music industry's legal costs, which have run into millions of dollars. Sharman has vowed to appeal the decision.
Assuming its appeal fails, Sharman's coffers will be emptied and its software rendered utterly useless for the task that once made it so popular: illegally trading MP3s.
The whole thing seems so Napster, so 1999. And yet, how subtly times have changed.
Awkwardly for Kazaa, the court's position on copyrights is now pretty much where a big portion of the P2P developer world sits, at least in public. Napster creator Shawn Fanning now runs a company called SnoCap that's making tools to help companies like Kazaa go legit. Bram Cohen, the brain behind BitTorrent, preaches a new "responsible" P2P ethic that ostensibly frowns on freeloaders in search of the latest Hollywood blockbuster.
The new P2P moderates are careful to dismiss pirating copyright works on their networks as a distorted use of the technology, whose power and importance goes well beyond simply hooking up teenagers with the latest Britney Spears cut. This is a distinction that Wilcox was careful to endorse in Monday's ruling, where he attempted to distance himself from June's U.S. Supreme Court Grokster decision while at the same time remaining generally consistent with it.
Both of the decisions aimed to prevent illegitimate uses of peer-to-peer tools, while preserving the legitimacy -- indeed, the worldwide historical importance -- of the tools themselves.
Of course, the reality is that P2P providers of all stripes are enormously dependent on pirated works, which make up the vast bulk of usage. Without the free copyright-protected stuff, there's not a lot left over to float a commercial enterprise like Sharman Networks. The P2P phenomenon exists primarily because of the illegal uses, and weaning users away from pirated works -- if it can be accomplished at all -- will make P2P less relevant as a technology over the long haul, not more so.
That's a result the recording industry is happy to endorse.
"Anyone who says this was about the technology has missed the point of the case and the judgment," said recording industry spokesman Speck. "If you set up a business deliberately to harvest and facilitate infringing activity it doesn't matter what technology you use. This is solely about the misuse of technology."
