Kazaa get reprieve in Australia

P2P Net have the transcript of the hearing in an Australian court where Sharman Networks, owners of Kazaa, were given an extension to the deadline to implement filters. It seems the music industry's lawyers failed to attend a court ordered meeting about how the technicalities of the filtering were supposed to work but the judge does try not to let that cloud his judgement, even though he's angry about it.

The judge said:

"I thought it was discourteous in the extreme for your clients to notify that they wouldn't attend by an email sent at 8 minutes to 6 on the Friday night for an appointment that had been arranged for a long time which was due to start at 9 am on Monday. It is just not acceptable for solicitors to behave in that way to a Registrar of the court...

I just want to express as forcibly as I can, when I make directions for attendance before the Registrar I expect practitioners to treat the Registrar with the normal courtesies we would expect from each other."

The technical Registrar in a report to the court said

"Whilst the applicants had displayed co-operation in attending the first conclave and their technical representatives demonstrated good faith in contributing to the development of the protocol, it was unfortunate that this co-operation did not extend to their attendance at the resumed conclave."

So they engaged in the process to begin with but then pulled out because they reckoned the Kazaa folks were not taking it seriously, even though the court appointed officer felt that they were.

Kim Weatherall called the judge's decision on Kazaa "brave" when it was published primarily because of the huge amount of work she predicted would come the court's way in supervising this kind of process. This kind of spat was predictable though I'm not sure "brave" was the right descriptor. The transcript is quite entertaining in places with the judge suggesting to the music industry lawyer that they hadn't been too clever in their tactics - if they'd gone to the meeting and put it clearly on the record that Kazaa were not taking the filtering seriously and got the REgistrar to accept that, then Kazaa could have been in serious difficulties coming back before the court asking for a stay on the injunction. Instead they took their bat and walked away, insulting the court appointed registrar into the bargin. Interestingly enough the judge goes on to criticise both sides for their posturing.

It's well worth a read if you follow the politics and legalities of p2p file sharing.