The world's most popular peer-to-peer file swapping program has told an Australian court that even its own no-tolerance policy can't stop child pornographers from using their network.
Phil Morle, the director of technology for Sharman Networks, the owners and creators of KaZaA, told an Australian federal court this week that he doesn't know how a child pornographer could be barred from KaZaA's network.
This came over a year after a Sharman executive told a U.S. Senate committee the company didn't want KaZaA used as a child porn conductor and would include family filtering in KaZaA operations. Peer-to-peer critics have often accused KaZaA and competitors of facilitating porn file-swapping including child porn, though the P2P networks have denied actively doing so.
Morle's testimony also reported included his saying under cross examination that he didn't even know who the owners or directors of Sharman were. This as court judges asked repeatedly about whether there was a central KaZaA server to be used to collect data about network users or show Sharman has some control over what it stores.
The testimony came amidst a case in which Australian record companies are suing Sharman claiming KaZaA cost them millions worth of lost music sales. Morle also told the court Sharman has no control over what its estimated one hundred million network users do with the program or what they swap.
Another witness, this one for the record companies, told the court KaZaA users were warned of potential infringement before they used the system. University of Melbourne professor Leon Sterling told the court had previously said in a court affidavit that KaZaA didn't warn users of those issues adequately, but under cross examination he admitted the warning was clear in two pages of the KaZaA user guide.
Australian Federal Court Justice Murray Wilcox – who once called the elusive KaZaA server the Cheshire Cat of a case he likened to Alice in Wonderland – had previously said he didn't expect to rule in the lawsuit until early 2005, but he also said KaZaA would not be ordered to shut down.
