American music and film groups battling peer-to-peer networks may not be happy to learn that the Supreme Court of the Netherlands has ruled KaZaA itself is lawful to make available.
A statement from KaZaA founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who subsequently sold the company to Sharman Networks of Australia, called the high court decision an "historic victory for the evolution of the Internet and for consumers."
This is believed to be the first time any Supreme Court has ruled on the legality of peer-to-peer network software itself, and the Dutch high court ruling confirms an earlier ruling from the Amsterdam Court of Appeal that said just offering KaZaA the program did not by itself equal direct copyright infringement.
A similar ruling in the United States earlier this year, involving Grokster and Morpheus, helped escalate the incumbent war between the music and film industries and the P2P community.
Buma/Stemra, a Dutch music rights society not dissimilar to the Recording Industry Association of America, had wanted the Dutch high court to decide KaZaA directly equaled copyright infringement because it allows users to share multiple file types.
"We now have the unpleasant situation," Buma/Stemra head of legal affairs Cees van Rij told reporters, "that only the consumers who swap music can be held accountable for copyright violation." Another company spokesperson, Noortje de Bakker, told reporters Buma/Stenra hoped to have better success promoting such paid file-swap alternatives like Apple's iTunes, the revamped and legal Napster, and MusicMatch, among others.
Zennstrom and Friis have since created a new software program, Skype, which enables peer-to-peer telephony and lets users make free, high-quality, unlimited calls on the Internet. This program is said to have been downloaded four million times since its August premiere.
