Petteri Pyyny
13 Jan 2003 10:14
Los Angeles federal judge ruled on last week's Friday in a landmark decision that the owner of Kazaa, Sharman Networks, can be sued in the United States.
The ruling is a landmark that many, many countries and companies have been watching carefully, since with this decision United States basically applies its own law to foreign companies and possibly also to foreign individuals if the ruling is going to be used also against Sharman Networks' executives.
Sharman Networks claimed that it can't be sued in the U.S., because company is headquartered in Australia, registered in small island of Tuvalu and runs all of its servers outside U.S. However, the judge decided that since many of the Kazaa's users are Americans and that most of the movie studios and record labels who are sueing it are American, it can be sued in the U.S.
Now, because of this decision, Sharman Networks' case will be bundled with the other FastTrack companies' cases. In so-called "FastTrack case", the movie and music industries (MPAA and RIAA) have sued three software companies who distribute P2P clients that connect with FastTrack P2P network; Sharman Networks, Streamcast (which owns Morpheus that used to use FastTrack network, but doesn't use it anymore) and Grokster.
Source: News.com