Just what role the Altnet system plays in the business of Sharman Networks and its controversial KaZaA peer-to-peer file swapping network, was examined December 15 during the current trial pitting Sharman against Australia's music industry.
The Australian music industry has charged in its litigation against Sharman that Altnet and Sharman "are tightly integrated" in aiding and abetting copyright infringement, according to reports from the Australian news media.
But an affidavit from the forensic director of KPMG, Rodney McKemmis, said that a critical search function on the Altnet system – the TopSearch Dynamic Link Library riles on a user's computer – are critical to hunting licensed files, also known as "Gold" files, and only those. Meaning, McKemmis said, that unlicensed or "Blue" files are strictly KaZaA software's responsibility.
"The TopSearch DLL is only concerned with the search for Gold Files," the McKemmish affidavit said, "and as such it is KaZaA that is solely responsible for locating Blue files and displaying the search results for both Gold and Blue files."
KaZaA uses Altnet-provided technology but Altnet technology was made to be independent of any single peer-to-peer program, McKemmish added. "[KaZaA Media Desktop] is not dependent on the TopSearch DLL to function with respect of versions 2.7.1 and 2.7.2," McKemmish said in his affidavit. "By removing the TopSearch DLL file from KaZaA, a search can still be performed, with only Blue files being present in the search results.… I do not believe that KaZaA version 2.6.6 is reliant upon the TopSearch DLL to undertake a search for, and download of, any file other than Gold files."
The Sharman-KaZaA trial continued as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission stepped into the P2P controversy a little more directly, hosting a two-day workshop on the networks and their concurrent issues in which both the P2P supporters and opponents were said, on the first day December 16, to have accused each other of trying to put one over on the federal government.
P2P United executive director Adam Eisgrau was quoted as telling FTC staffers the commission has been handed a lot of deliberately deceptive and misleading information from various industry groups about the file swapping technology. "The parents and grandparents who run the companies in P2P are not Darth Vader," Eisgrau was quoted as saying.
But the Recording Industry Association of America's senior vice president of litigation, Stanley Pierre-Louis, reportedly told FTC staffers that 99 percent of P2P network traffic involved copyrighted material and P2P systems are designed explicitly to offload the liability to their consumers.
"These purveyors have consciously not done anything to stop rampant infringement on their networks," Pierre-Louis was quoted as saying. "Until courts properly provide recourse against illicit P2P services... consumers will continue to find themselves liable.... Few appreciate how great the consequences can be."
The FTC became more interested in the P2P issue after consumer complaints about spyware, viruses, and actually or allegedly rampant porn passing through the P2P networks. The commission is still pondering whether to write regulations on how P2P can be marketed, if commissioners decide in the end that P2P companies mislead users.
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear in March an appeal in the case of the movie industry against Grokster and Morpheus parent StreamCast, after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that those P2P networks could not be held liable for infringement committed by their users, since those networks lacked central storage of such materials.
