Way back in the day when the Cartel was celebrating its crushing of Napster I pointed out that this was rather like smashing a blob of mercury with a hammer. File trading existed long before Napster and destroying that one entity did nothing to stem the tide of file sharing. Users scattered and multiplied. Now the Cartel seeks to repeat history, its sledge poised above Kazaa.

I probably won't blog this extensively - there are many sites providing blow-by-blow accounts of the trial in Australia. A few salient points:

Kazaa owners apparently will be revealed in court. The company has tried to use the haven of Vanuatu but the Cartel claim to have penetrated that shell. This is mostly counting coup - I doubt that the owners can be held personally liable and will simply walk away from the corporate wreckage. It does illustrate the persistence of the Cartel, though, and their international reach. If you plan to confront them in a big way you might as well do it above-board because they're going to hunt you down no matter what. Fine, let's get it on.

Kazaa are employing a Betamax defense, even though that doctrine is US precendent, not Australian. None of the stories I've read make clear how this notion of having non-infringing uses will play out with current Australian law and precedent.

Kazaa may be in some court logic trouble because of an anti-child pornography stance. A Syndey story notes that the company's Web site contained language warning users that they would be thrown off the network if they were found to be trading in kiddie porn. Fair enough, but why (the Cartel's lawyers wisely ask) can Kazaa take a stand against kiddie porn but not music trading?

Ironically, one of the charges being leveled by the Cartel lawyers is that Kazaa set out to deliberately harm it by encouraging file trading. This is a fine Catch-22, since the Cartel initially refuses to license content and then claims deliberate harm.

Everyone seems to agree that the trial verdict won't be rendered until sometime next year and that the verdict will be appealed no matter which way it goes. Kazaa is history if it loses, of course. But I can confidently predict, just as I did five years ago, that the end result will be no net change in file sharing. The Cartel needs to wise up and start owning this business instead of trying to decimate it.