Kazaa Fires Back At Hollywood, Labels For Obscene Misuse Of Copyrights

from the whoo-hoo dept

Well, this is just starting to get fun. Apparently realizing that Hollywood and the music industry are nowhere near coming to accept file sharing systems as a legitimate channel for promoting their products, Kazaa (Sharman Networks) has gone on the offensive. They're now suing movie studios and record labels for "obscenely" abusing their copyrights. The lawsuit claims that the major labels and studios have colluded to keep out competition, in violation of antitrust laws, saying this should remove their ability to defend their copyrights in court. To prove the point, they claim that they tried to legally license content from the movie and music industries, but they were colluded against (a difficult point to prove). However, this is picking up on the remains of the Napster case, where the judge wondered if some of the music industry's hatred towards Napster was fueled by the fact that they had backed their own digital music distribution services.
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