Last month, Australian Federal Court judge Murray Wilcox ordered Sharman Networks, owners of Kazaa, to install filters in order to block the unauthorized trading of copyrighted content. However, Australian record companies recently complained to the judge that Kazaa had ignored the order and that it’s business as usual for the peer-to-peer file sharing company.

The use of filters – in this case, approximately 3,000 keywords relating to popular entertainment content – has yet to satisfy copyright holders when it comes to file swapping. When the original Napster tried that same route during the final year of its existence, that P2P’s user-base thwarted the filters by slightly changing the spelling of file and artist names. While Napster programmers frantically worked to leash the monster Shawn Fanning had wrought, Napster users treated the filtering effort like a game of “stick it to the man” and quickly managed to circumvent keyword traps.

Now it’s Napster redux for Kazaa – Australian style. But the Aussie labels aren’t buying into Sharman’s claims that the company is trying to halt illicit trading.

Sharman says it’s complying with the judge’s order by prohibiting Australians from downloading its P2P client software.

Like that’s going to stop anyone.

“Attention users in Australia,” reads the notice on the Kazaa homepage. “To comply with orders of the Federal Court of Australia, pending an appeal in the February 2006, use of the Kazaa Media Desktop is not permitted by persons in Australia. If you are in Australia, you must not download or use the Kazaa Media Desktop.”

But unlike the original Napster, Kazaa is a non-centralized P2P. Napster maintained a centralized index of what its users had on their hard drives. Once Napster took the index offline, the trading ceased.

Not so with Kazaa, and while Australians may not download the Kazaa software, you can bet that most Australians wanting to grab some free music already have the software. What’s more, any filtering effort by Sharman will only work if users download the latest version of the software. Those trading away using previous versions shouldn’t have any problem grabbing some copyrighted booty.

As to Sharman’s attempts to prevent Australians from downloading the software, as well as the company’s postings warning users not to trade in copyrighted material, the Australian record labels were not exactly impressed.

“Sharman has thumbed its nose at the court,” Stephen Peach, chief exec of the Australian Recording Industry Association, said in a statement denouncing Sharman’s latest efforts to limit copyrighted file trading. “They were given a chance to do the right thing and they’ve ruined it. They cannot be trusted to even take the simplest steps towards complying with the court’s orders and again have shown they intend to do nothing about the illegal activities occurring on a massive scale on their system.”