TORONTO — The Canadian Recording Industry Association is calling on Ottawa to make sure Canada's copyright law is up to par after an Australian court ruled popular file-swapping network Kazaa was illegal.

"The law that is currently on the books - that's enforced - is so antiquated that the net result has been, (that) despite all of our best efforts, Canada's become a piracy haven," association president Graham Henderson said in an interview Monday.

"We have lobbied for years . . . to get those laws up to date so we're in line with everyone in the world - and I mean everyone else."

The group represents the companies that produce more than 95 per cent of all records sold in Canada,

According to a June report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Canada has the highest per capita rate of unauthorized file-swapping in the world. It has also been reported to have the second highest level of broadband penetration, making it vulnerable to piracy.

But in what Henderson and other industry insiders are calling a wake-up call to Internet traffickers, a Federal Court ruling in Australia on Monday found six defendants guilty of copyright infringement and ordered them to pay back 90 per cent of the record industry's costs in the case.

The defendants included Kazaa's owner, Sharman Networks Ltd., and its Sydney-based chief executive officer, Nikki Hemming, as well as Altnet, a company that provided some of the software for the Kazaa website.

Software for Kazaa, which until recently was the largest unauthorized file-sharing service with a peak of 4.7 million users worldwide, will no longer be available to download.

Kazaa's lawyers had argued that the software was no different from a tape recorder or photocopier, and that Kazaa could therefore not control copyright infringement by users of the network.

It's an argument that CIRA lawyer Richard Pfohl says could be interpreted in the wording of Canada's existing draft legislation, and one that may protect Internet pirates.

"Kazaa might well take a good look up here and (say) 'Canada looks pretty good.' And we can't have that," Henderson added.

He says he hopes the government will make the amendments necessary to give a robust copyright law when the legislation is debated in September, so that the record industry can get its fair share of the digital marketplace.

"The opportunity is here. The world - legislators, courts, people around the world - are speaking very clearly about what the new social norm is. And it's not free copyright," he said.

The Australian judgment comes 10 weeks after an unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruling against the file-swapping operator Grokster, and three years after the shutdown of the original Napster.