Petteri Pyyny
3 Dec 2002 2:50
In a surprise move, federal court Judge Stephen Wilson, delayed his decision on FastTrack P2P case where both parties -- RIAA and MPAA and two of the FastTrack P2P software vendors, Grokster and Streamcast (owner of the Morpheus) -- are seeking for summary judgment motions before the case goes to an actual trial.
The third FastTrack company, Sharman Networks, the owner of the Kazaa and the owner of the FastTrack technology, didn't attend to the court hearing, because the court still has to decide whether the U.S. court has jurisdiction over the company or not. Sharman Networks has headquarters at Australia, is incorporated in small island of Vanuatu and doesn't have any servers in the U.S. soil.
Basically in the hearing both parties referred to a famous P2P case of Napster -- copyright owners' lawyers stating that FastTrack operators are identical to that of Napster and "FastTrack companies" arguing that because they don't operate any central servers (unlike Napster did), the Napster ruling doesn't apply to them.
Judge basically stated after the hearing that he is not ready to issue summary judgments at this point and needed more time to determine if the case should go to trial or not. Also, he probably needs time to determine whether or not the Sharman Networks should be included to the case.
More info:
Houston Chronicle
Yahoo!
(please note, most of the external articles confuse Grokster and Kazaa happily in their articles, so ignore those parts -- at least we've got the facts correct ;-)