Well, that was a travesty.
It all started when the defendant decided to be brutally honest and say that he used KaZaA to download files. He made a huge mistake and agreed that he distributed them too.
As I’ve already said, it IS possible to install KaZaA and not actually distribute anything. It’s possible to restrict access to the shared folder without any third party software. This works because the way a directory listing is read is not the same form of access as actually reading the files. You can have access to view a folder but not access to read the files within the folder. With the correct set up, it’s entirely possible for KaZaA to see – and serve the list of – the contents of a folder, but not to be able to send the contents of the folder to anyone, as in effect anyone accessing the filesystem through KaZaA has guest access privileges, and if the guest account can’t share the folder then nobody can request a file. The actual KaZaA program has system access privileges to read the folder contents, which can be different from the guest account access privileges.
So, as soon as he admitted to this, the judge decided to instruct the jury to find him liable, despite the fact that up to that point the plaintiff hadn’t presented anywhere near enough evidence to prove liability. Of course, in an appeal, the plaintiffs will grab hold of this admission which could cause an appeal to fail too. This is unfortunately not the first time I’ve seen someone open their mouth in court and say too much. He should have admitted to using the program, no more than that, and said that it was up to the plaintiffs to prove anything was actually downloaded from him (since they’d already effectively admitted they couldn’t.)
So damages wise it’s not as bad as it could be, it’s less than a million, but it’s still going to drive him into bankruptcy. Result for the RIAA, travesty for the rest of us.
I really wish that the judges in these cases were a lot better at finding someone who was not only tech-savvy but good at explaining in laymans terms what goes on with these programs. Using KaZaA – or in fact ANY P2P program – does not necessarily automatically equate to full file sharing.
But those who really know what they’re doing don’t bother with P2P anyway – it’s slow, it’s inefficient and it’s insecure, and there are far more efficient, faster and safer ways to transfer files.