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Kazaa to be shut down?
darkpriest writes "According to this article on The Register, the file sharing software KazaA has been ordered to cease copyright infringment. They have two weeks to comply with the Judges ruling or face a penalty of $40,000 a day." CD: We've gotten a number of submissions about this, I had no idea Kazaa was this popular (must be all those a's in their name). I bet anyday that the RIAA will sue cisco for making routers that could be used to infringe.
For those who didn't read the artikle, it's a Dutch court who ordered the Dutch company to cease & desist.
More to the point, Kazaa (the file sharing system) and FastTrack (the network (and libraries for accessing it)) are one and the same, so this should also affect Morpehus and Grokster (not to mention the buggy linux Kazaa client) !
This is bad bad news. Quick to the Kazaa before it goes away !
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The hard part about this is that the FT stack was designed to be distributed, like Gnutella.
There is not central server, like there was with Napster.
It's all peer->peer->Superpeer, where the SuperClient helps to route things, solving the scaling problems of Gnutella.
So there isn't a Server to shut down.
A least, there never USED to be.
When GiFT came out, Kazaa and Morpheus switched to authorizing people through a centralized sever, before accessing the peer->peer network.
Coincidentally, shortly after they implemented this filter, they were sued.
Let's look who's been sued over this.
Napster, Imesh, Kazaa post-auth server
Who hasn't been sued
Bearshare, Limewire, Kazaa pre-auth server, GiFT, Freenet, WinMX
It seems that the RIAA knows that they don't have a chance of shutting down a network that doesn't use a central server, so they aren't trying.
You may also have a stronger legal case that way. In the napster hearings, one of the key points was that napsters servers let it happen. Napster had control.
I think that what we're learning from this is if you never touch the packets yourself, just release the client and hope for the best, you're in much safer waters.
Colin
Colin Davis
And by the way, for those that are modding this... I do not work for WinMX in any capacity, nor do I have any financial or personal stake in it. I'm just trying to help the people that looked at this article and thought, "Well, damn. What's left for me to go to now that doesn't suck?".
It's pretty clear that it's a big part of the reason they're being targetted by the BSA, RIAA, etc. currently... I can only hope that University research into these things doesn't fuel the corporate interests backing the anti-P2P movement.
DeCSS? Explicitly developed to enable playing DVDs on Open Source computers with DVD drives. It's hardly practical to share full-length movies over networks or even to store them locally on hard drives -- although you should note that the latter use is not infringing. I for one can't think of a single use for DeCSS that's infringing under the traditional doctrine of fair use, given the current practical technological limitations. It may well be in violation of the DMCA, but that's a seriously broken law that undermines rights that consumers of intellectual property have enjoyed for a very long time. The DMCA isn't Norweigian law, anyway.
Skylarov? His product is entirely legal in the country where he wrote it. In fact, without his company's product it's Adobe's software that's illegal. It's against the law to erect technological barriers to fair use in Russia, but that's what Adobe's so-called encryption does. It's his company that ought to have been held accountable for marketing the product in the US where it was illegal; Skylarov himself as an employee had nothing to do with that. If he's guilty of anything, it's of demonstrating that Adobe's claims about the security of their encryption scheme was a total crock. Embarrassing corporations isn't illegal -- yet.
Peer-to-peer networks? All of them run on top of the Internet, which, in the event you haven't noticed, is one vast peer-to-peer network designed for freely sharing information. None of the other indexing schemes for available information, such as Gopher or even some web pages, are not fundamentally different from networks like Gnutella.
And the brethren went away edified.
The register points to this article on webwereld.nl . Since i am not aware of any automated translaters:
Rechter: KaZaA over twee weken dicht
judge:Kaza must close in 2 weeks
This is the remarkable outcome of a "kort geding" (court where outcome is in a short time) between kazaA and music right organisation "Buma/Stemra". If kazaa does not comply they must pay 100.00 guildens (~45.000 euro) a day with a max of 2 Million guildens. This outcome can end the Kazaa, that is one of the biggest music exchane services since the departure of napster.
The judge also dertermined that BUMA/stemra must meet with Kazaa to negotiate a contract where Kaaza can legaly offer misc via the internet. Accoridng to kazaa there was already a oral agreement with the buma/stemra the they canceled the engotioations.
Loyer Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm sees the judgement as a vicotry , in spite of the closing threat. "it is fantastic that they have to negotioate with us again. That means we still have enough time to make an agreement."
...
about the passage in the verdict about the "auteursrecht" [copy right? ] he is less to speak. "in the verdict is that kazaa breachtes the copyright. This is nonsense. The users are responsible for this. With the same argument one could close the suppliers of video recorders"
. . . appeal. . .
according to Alberdingk Thijm the verdict only has consequense for the software. This means that the network where also morpheur and grokster make use of stay 'open'. Poeple who already have installed kazaa soule be able to continue with using the network.
.
.
.
Buma/stemra did not react. "we do that when we studied the verdict"
[sorry for speliing errors and parts left out]
The FastTrack network has a very scalable two-level structure. Every computer on the network is initially a 'node', however nodes with significant bandwidth are promoted to 'supernode' status.
The KaZaa/Morpheus servers handle logging in and refer the node to a supernode, where the node sends its list of files it wants to share. These super-nodes store these lists, and search queries are forwarded to the supernodes.
A supernode also gives the lists of some of the clients its connected to, so if the supernode disappears nodes can talk to other nodes about supernodes without getting kicked off the network.
So, effectively the network is controlled by the supernodes, which can be just ordinary PCs with reasonable bandwidth. The KaZaa servers only handle the logging in pretty much, so I doubt the FastTrack network could ever technically be shut down. Unfortunately the FastTrack protocol is very proprietary, and uses some closed-source algorithms. It would be good to see someone create an open-source 'equivalent' of the p2p protocol with the excellent features of FastTrack.
Anyway that's just my understanding of the FastTrack network, correct me if I'm wrong.
Piracy is an act of robbery committed at sea. Any other use of the word is an attempt to make a minor crime sound a lot more heinous than it really is. Thank the spin doctors at the BSA, MPAA, and RIAA for this wonderful use of language.
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It would be good to see someone create an open-source 'equivalent' of the p2p protocol with the excellent features of FastTrack.
Try OpenFT / giFT.