A victory for the recording industry today - a federal court has ruled that the popular file-swapping program Kazaa is ‘Illegal’. Federal court judge, Murray Wilcox made a statement that Kazaa’s distributers, including owners took no action to rein in illegal activity even after the fact that the Kazaa website had posted warnings for users of the popular music file-swapping service to not swap material that has been copyrighted.

A total of 10 defendants have been found guilty by the federal court in Austria, guilty of copyright infringement. All of them have been ordered to pay a whopping 90% of the costs spent by the record industry. A hearing is scheduled soon to outline the details of the damage.

Kazaa software owners plan to appeal the court’s decision claiming that the software is no different then a tape-recorder, stating that they are unable to control the users that engage in copyright violations. Since 2002, Kazaa has lost popularity due to these court battles, personally I prefer other music trading services - Kazaa is just not very good and there are others that are much better that are out there.

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