Weed Used In Australian Kazaa Court Case

Released on = December 3, 2004, 6:51 am

Press Release Author = Ozmusicweed

Industry = Entertainment

Press Release Summary = Kazaa establish in court that it can be used for legal purposes.

Press Release Body = Ozmusicweed, the first Australian Weedshare site (www.ozmusicweed.com) has been involved in the currently unfolding court case in Sydney Australia involving Sharman Networks, providers of the Kazaa software against Sony, BMG, Festival Mushroom and Warner brothers. 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 often used to trade illegal files. Sharman have been trying to establish that Kazaa can be used for legal purposes such as Weedshare. 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.”

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.

Australian indie labels already using the Weedshare system include Roadrunner Records, Ward 69 Records, Pandamonium Records, Fireball Records, Unstable Ape Records, Awakenings Records and more coming on board at an exponential rate.

Ozmusicweed is owned by QLD label Pandamonium Records & were the first Australian Independent Content Provider licensed by Shared Media Licensing in the U.S to bring music into the Weedshare system, and are currently the biggest provider of Australian content in the Weedshare system.

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Web Site = http://www.ozmusicweed.com

Contact Details = Todd Macalpine
PO Box 6438
Cairns QLD Australia
ph 0423009459
info@ozmusicweed.com