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Huzzah! Dutch Appeals Court Legitimizes KaZaA
Posted by Ernest Miller on Thursday, March 28 @ 12:01:05 EST File Sharing
Yahoo! News carries a Reuters wirestory reporting that file swapping service KaZaA has won a major legal victory in the copyright lawsuit filed against it (Dutch Court Clears Web Music Swapping). A Dutch appeals court has overturned a lower court decision and ruled that KaZaA may continue to distribute its file swapping software. Although the decision is not immediately available in English, it appears that the court was persuaded by arguments regarding KaZaA's inability to control how users used the system (unlike the old-school centralized server architecture of the original Napster) and the fact that the software can be used to swap all file types. KaZaA's sharing software is based on FastTrack technology, as is Grokster. MusicCity's Morpheus software was also based on FastTrack's technology, but due to a dispute has recently switched to a Gnutella-based engine known as Gnucleus (Morpheus Booted Off Fasttrack, Uses Gnucleus ). It will be interesting to see how this affects the ongoing U.S. case that pits the RIAA and MPAA against KaZaA, Grokster and Morpheus, all of whom were sued in the U.S. last year (RIAA targets post-Napster MP3 sharers). Slashdot readers celebrate (Kazaa Is Legal, Dutch Appeals Court Rules). Kuro5hin has a translation of a news report in Dutch (Dutch court rules KaZaA legal). Apparently, the decision may also create liability for the group that brought the lawsuit.
 
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Huzzah! Dutch Appeals Court Legitimizes KaZaA

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