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Originally Posted by willravel
No. The divice or service must directly circumvent legal owndership laws. Kazaa markets itself as a p2p network where you can download songs and video files and such. It is primarily used to circumvent the law. It is illegal because of this. The people who use the p2p networks to traffic in pirated files are also guilty, as they have broken copyright laws. The lawsuit is not frivelous.
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Yep, that's one side of the argument. The other one being that Kazaa is nothing but a framework for filesharing, and it's not up to the government to decide that the intentions of certain people who use it to break the law make P2P apps inherently illegal. The point of contention regarding the law you stated is whether it really was designed to circumvent copyright laws, and whether it has limited use otherwise. Don't forget that a lot of independent musicians release things on Kazaa, I knew a bunch of college bands who would distribute their music just to see how far it spread.
It's like rolling papers, or "tobacco water pipes".. Everyone knows that they're almost exclusively used for smoking pot, but that's irrelevant: there's nothing illegal about a piece of pipe with a tube sticking out of the side, and it's marketed for use with tobacco. The fact that most people buy it with other intentions in mind don't make the product itself illegal.