Kazaa makes the rules - report

The affidavit contains a report from George Barker, director of the Australian National University\'s Centre for Law and Economics, Intellectual Property and Copyright, and focuses on the financial consequences of the Kazaa system, which is run by Sharman Networks. The report asserts that Kazaa is a \'marketplace\' that brings together people who have copyrighted works and people who want to make unauthorised copies of such. The report adds that Kazaa \'designs the rules, facilitates the “market” for exchange of copyright works, and enforces or has the capacity to enforce the rules of that market\'. In addition, the report details how Kazaa makes it profits from unauthorised music sharing and the damage this causes to the music industry and, by extension, to the Australian economy. Full CNET News report

Staying with file-sharing issues, a Japanese man has been sentenced to one year in prison, suspended for three years, for making two movies available on the Internet via the Winny P2P program, reports E-Commerce Times. According to the Kyoto District Court ruling, Yoshihuro Inoue violated Japanese copyright law by using the peer-to-peer program, which facilitated the piracy. In September this year, Isamu Kaneko, creator of Winny, pleaded not guilty to a charge of developing the software knowing it would facilitate Internet piracy. Full E-Commerce Times report