US technical experts will fly to Australia to examine whether song files swapped by users of Kazaa, the world's most popular Internet file-swapping system, can be filtered, a judge hearing a copyright case has ruled. The experts were due to arrive in Sydney at the weekend to debate whether its song files could be filtered to restrict the illegal flow of music on Kazaa's "peer-to-peer" network on the Internet, the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper said on Saturday.
Thirty record companies from around the world are suing Kazaa's Australian owners and developers, Sharman Networks and Altnet, claiming that file swapping through Kazaa has cost them millions of dollars in lost sales.
The case, which echoes the 2001 shutdown of renegade song-swap service Napster, began on Monday in the Australian Federal Court. In 2003, Kazaa software was cleared of liability for copyright infringement in the Netherlands.
The judge hearing the case has said that Kazaa would not be ordered to shut down as part of the copyright lawsuit.
"You're entitled to protect your copyright. You're not entitled to control the Internet," Federal Court Justice Murray Wilcox told the record companies' lawyers on Thursday.
The music companies taking the court case in Sydney include the local arms of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, EMI Group Plc, Warner, Universal Music and several other Australian firms.