Lawyer for
Sharman Networks,
Mark Lemming, has accused University of Melbourne professor
Leon Sterling of switching sides in the
Kazaa trial currently taking place in Sydney Australia. He alleges that at one time Leon Sterling had offered to be an expert witness for Sharman Networks, but later emailed them withdrawing an offer to be an expert witness for Sharman during the civil trial, saying that writing a report requested by Sharman would be
"stretching his expertise." During cross-examination, Lemming used the e-mail to question Sterling's expertise in the trial against the company, which makes the Kazaa peer-to-peer software.
"Your lack of experience in P2P makes it difficult for you to tell the court of any feasibility for the propositions you mentioned," Lemming said.
Sterling claims that it was not possible for him to put together an expert report on how the Kazaa P2P network works because of the limited time he had to do it. Sterling added that he was not able to do a feasibility study on the proposals that he made and acknowledged that any filtering done in Sharman's Kazaa system would not be 100 percent efficient. However on Tuesday, Sterling made suggestions on how to filter and monitor the network, and he continues to back his suggestions, calling them
"all plausible mechanisms" that can be added to the Kazaa system.
Source:
ZDnet
Written by: James Delahunty @ 8 Dec 2004 12:12
