Australian court rules against Kazaa

[Steve]

The now not so popular P2P program Kazaa, has had a ruling against it in the Australian courts. The judge ruled that despite Sharman Network's defence that they couldn't control what people did with their P2P software, the website for Kazaa seemed to make infringing copyright 'cool'. However, is the ruling of any significance now? The BBC reports:

The victory for the record industry may be too little, too late. Research shows that file-sharers have already moved from Kazaa to other peer-to-peer software.

"It just isn't as big a player as it once was, as BitTorrent and eDonkey are now far more important to file sharers," said Professor Michael Geist, an e-commerce expert at Ottawa University.

At the end of 2004, 60% of the net's traffic was P2P, but how much of that was sharing of music illegally?

[Dougal]

Depends whether you are looking at bandwidth (data transfer rates), total data dransfer, number of files or combinations.

If its numbers of files, then it could easily be lots of images over P2P.

If its total data transfer, it could be large files such as software distributions.

We don't know *what* they define traffic as!

[autopilot]

Chasing after file networks, only to see then replaced with others is absolutely pointless. The only way they will stop illegal P2P is to force the ISP's to do more, which is what they are doing not, is it not?