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Ozmusicweed, the first Australian Weedshare site (http://www.ozmusicweed.com) has this week been involved in the currently unfolding court case in Sydney (NSD110/2004) involving Sharman Networks, providers of the Kazaa software against Universal Music Australia PTY LTD. The major labels are trying to implicate Sharman in the worlds biggest copyright case to date.
Kazaa, which holds the title of the worlds most downloaded program is a P2P program used to share files between users, and is notorious for being used to trade illegal copyright infringing files. Sharman have been trying to establish that Kazaa can be used for legitimate purposes such as sharing Weed files.
Today in court, affidavits from Todd Macalpine of Ozmusicweed, and John Leighton Beezer from the Weedshare parent company SML along with 10 other affidavits were rejected as evidence by judge Murray Wilcox. A representative from Sharman's PR agency said: 'The judge agreed there were significant non-infringing users of p2p technology, and there was no need to hear our affidavits putting all that together.' This is good news for Sharman Networks as they have successfully established that Kazaa can be used for legitimate purposes.
Weedshare (as in the music 'spreads like a weed') is a relatively new digital music distribution model that pays people to share music. Weed Files are basically windows media files (so most people already have the software needed to play them) with a very clever form of digital rights management built in. You can download and listen to a Weed file 3 times free before you have to pay for it, then if you buy it, the artist/label always get's 50%, the last 3 people to pass the song around get 35% (split 20%,10%, 5% in order of who purchased song first) and SML, the Weed parent company get 15% for administering the system. It's a natural thing to want to share music you like with people you like. Weedshare works on the principle that it's better to reward people for doing the right thing, rather than punishing them for doing the wrong thing.
Ozmusicweed are of the opinion that P2P networks like Kazaa need to filter out illegal content and replace it with distribution models such as Weedshare. The Major labels are claiming that Kazaa already has the capability to filter out infringing content. The case continues.
 News source: Top 40 Charts
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