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.

Comments

Popularity

[spectral]

Actually, according to download.com, kazaa and morpheus (which are the same program/network, really..) are the top two most downloaded programs.. Which makes me wonder if it's just Kazaa that was ordered to cease and desist, or does musiccity have to comply also? It's the same p2p network, with decentralized servers (I believe? I don't know all that much about their network), unlike napster's centrally controlled server farms.

Re:Popularity

[nsample]

We did a study in the P2P group at Stanford two months ago... with pretty interesting results. Kazaa (as monitored through a Morpheus client gateway) consistently topped out at over 50 terabytes of data and peeked at just over 1.1 million active clients. It's becoming truly ubiquitous, and it's growth rates (in terms of both users and size) indicate that they will be the unquestionable king of P2P in short order.

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.

Until we get universal television stations...

[bonoboy]

This will just keep happening.

Ok, maybe people will always want something for free, but the Internet file-sharing phenomenon is the single best argument for having simultaneous worldwide release of as many products as possible.

Now, to you North Americans, this isn't such a big issue, and you've probably never given it much thought. But to a native New Zealander and resident Australian like myself, who knows the pain of waiting a year or two to see episodes of Buffy (etc, etc, etc) that you could easily download for free, it is of paramount importance!

And another thing: a buddy of mine is a technical director on LOTR, and it's supposed to be a simultaneous worldwide release on December 19th. How is it then, that in Austalia, it's being released on December 26th? Was he wrong, or is the Australian Motion Picture League of Bastards screwing us again??

Re:Until we get universal television stations...

[Sloppy]

And another thing: a buddy of mine is a technical director on LOTR, and it's supposed to be a simultaneous worldwide release on December 19th. How is it then, that in Austalia, it's being released on December 26th?

That sucks! By the time you get to see it on the 26th, you'll have been exposed to a week's worth of spoilers from the internet, so you'll already know that Sauron Did It.

eyepatch department?

[Have Blue]

Sorry, chrisd, it is piracy unless you own the originals.

Re:eyepatch department?

[Accelerated Joe]

Sorry, chrisd, it is piracy unless you own the originals.

In this one specific area, I definitely agree with Richard Stallman. Piracy is a marketing word, with many connotations. I wish the community would use terms more like "unauthorized copying" or "illegal copies". Even plagiarism sounds better than piracy, semantically. The english language can in its current form duplicate many of the worst features of doublespeak.

Re:eyepatch department?

[tb3]

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.

Re:eyepatch department?

[Greg W.]

OK, I'll take the bait.

People don't want easy accessible music; they want free music.

Of course we do. Who wouldn't want free stuff?

But there's more to it than that. A lot more.

First of all, we want to be able to hear the music in the first place. Have you tried listening to commercial radio lately? For how long? The simple fact is that if we want to hear something that's been mentioned by a friend (either in "real life" or online), we can't get it from the radio. Radio doesn't play anything that anyone would ever recommend to anyone else. It's simply a marketing arm of the record companies trying to increase sales of the Pop-Star-of-The-Month.

Let's say I tell you how much I loved Tori Amos's third album Boys For Pele. Are you going to rush to the store and buy it based on that recommendation? Probably not. You'll at least want to hear it for yourself first.

So what choices does that give you?

1. Turn on the local alternative radio station and wait for them to play Tori. Hah! The last time I heard anything I'd describe as "alternative" on the radio was about 5 years ago. There aren't any "alternative" format stations in Cleveland now. There's one station that plays Limp Bizkit rap/metal, but nothing that plays "adult alternative" like Tori or REM. Nothing.
2. Turn on MTV and wait for them to play Tori. A-HAHAHA! See above. And below.
3. Turn on M2. What M2? Where is it on my cable channel list? Oh yeah, it's not there. If MTV wanted me to hear music, they'd play some fucking music instead of "reality shows". They wouldn't have moved all the music to a different channel that nobody actually gets. They'd just play music on MTV, and then put all the crap TV on the other station. But that's not what they want to do -- they don't want to play music any more. They want to show crap, because they think crap generates more money for them. Maybe it does -- but it's sure as hell not my money that they're pulling in.
4. Find samples on CDNOW or some other online vendor. This is sometimes feasible, but your chances of getting a sample of decent length (e.g., a whole song) are pretty low. The samples also tend to be low quality recordings. But the worst problem here is that they tend to be shackled in one or more ways. They may require you to submit an email address so they can spam you. Or they may require you to turn on Javascript and cookies. Or they may disallow access from non-Microsoft web browsers. Or they may release samples only in Microsoft/Real media formats (Real Audio, WMA, etc.). So you can't play them on Linux, even if you can download them in the first place, which is problematic.
5. You could buy a CD, listen to it a few times, and then return it to the store. Most stores don't let you do this. And even if you did, you're costing the store money for your own convenience. It's basically dishonest, and real people will be hurt by your actions. That makes it wrong.
6. You could find a copy of the song on an independent promotional site (what you're calling "pirate") and download it and listen to it. The problem here is that you might not find the song, and you might not be able to get it quickly (independent music promoters tend to have low-bandwidth upstream Internet links, like cable modems) or reliably (cable modems, dial-up). The ripping or the encoding (or both) might be flawed, or low-quality.
7. You could find a friend in meatspace who has the CD, and ask him or her to let you borrow it, or to make a copy for you. This has the obvious drawback that it only works if you happen to know someone who has the CD.

Which of these have the greatest likelihood of letting you hear the music? Probably the last two. Which have the greatest likelihood of leading to a monetary transaction between you and the artist? Well, none of them, so let me rephrase. Which of them have the greatest chance of getting you to send money to the record company who, in theory, passes money on to the artist? Probably #5: if you buy a CD from the store, all you have to do to "make a purchase" is keep it instead of returning it. But #6 is also good: if you like that Ogg file you downloaded, you might decide to buy a CD.

You sure as hell aren't going to be enriching the artist or the record company if you follow any of the first 3 models. And #4 is potluck, and your odds have gotten worse over time. #7 will depend on whether you got a cassette copy from your friend, or a burned CD, or whether you just borrowed his CD with the intention of returning it. If you got a burned CD copy, you may just keep that instead of buying your own.

So by my reckoning, downloading "pirate" music is at least the second-best money-making promotional model there is (or possibly the best) for the type of music that isn't played on commercial radio and MTV.

And that's at least 99% of all the music in the world.

If you're going to pirate something, at least admit to yourself that you're ripping off someone, not a victimized consumer standing up his rights.

If you're going to troll slashdot users, at least admit to yourself that you're a tool of the record companies and their hired public relations psychologists. And that you're helping them rip off 99% of the musicians in the world by systematically destroying all but the 1% who achieve "Star" status and therefore simply die poor instead of flat broke.

If you'd rather help artists, then donate money directly to them, or buy CDs straight from the artists instead of through the record companies (for the artists who are able to do that).

I't s a Dutch court making the order..

[Bitsy Boffin]

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 !

Centralized Servers == Bad

[E1ven]

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

WinMX

[DarkZero]

For anyone that's unfortunately bound to Windows and is looking for a new file sharing service to jump to, I'd recommend WinMX. It's a great P2P program that has always had whatever I'm looking for (and what I look for is pretty damn obscure, i.e. Asian pop and such), yet has still remained firmly under the radars of the RIAA and MPAA. Of course, at the rate the RIAA is going, every currently existing P2P program will be gone eventually (though they will be replaced with new ones in the mean time), but I estimate that you'll get at least six or ten months of use, and possibly much more, out of this one.

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?".

Not according to my dictionary.

[Error27]

From THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY ((C)1911 Released April 15 1993) [devils]:

PIRACY, n. Commerce without its folly-swaddles, just as God made it.

openFT an alternative?

[fault0]

Last I heard, not only were the giFT folks made an open sourced version of fasttrack (used by both kazaa and morpheus), but also, they were developing openFT, which is compeletely independent of kazaa, so if it were to go down, then we could still use it. there'd be no way to block it either, and it works much better (as in more reliably) than gnutella.

note that a few days after kazaa blocked giFT, they were sued by the RIAA. this was because they switched to a partially centralized network from a network that had previously only used central servers for authentication (which giFT had never used).

Good riddance to spyware

[Sarcasmooo!]

I don't like the copyright cartel anymore than most people here; in fact I probably hate them a lot more than most people do. But I also hate having spyware installed on my system without my knowledge. Like Kazaa does with Cydoor. So to all the guys at Kazaa, you can't see it, but at this very instant I'm giving you the big middle finger.

Re:Cisco is too big for the bully

[CaptainCarrot]

You're ignorant.

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.

webwereld.nl

[leuk_he]

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]

It's no big deal ...

[uebernewby]

... really.

The RIAA (well, in this case their Dutch counterparts BUMA/STEMRA, actually) are fighting a losing battle, as they probably know very well. At least, they should know this from looking at recent events surrounding napster.

First, there's a thing called GNUtella. Doesn't work very well, but it works, but, well, it doesn't work very well. Then, for a while (how long did Napster actually last? A few months or so?) something comes along that does the same as GNUtella, but it's much easier to use. So everyone switches over, because, well, freedom and decentralization are nice ideas and all, but ease of use is nice too. For a few months, everyone uses the ultra friendly Napster thing 'till the RIAA takes note and sues Napster. Exit Napster. Tons of internet (l)users have, however, by now learnt of the joys of P2P filesharing, so they go to GNUtella, which may suck, but it's still better than nothing.

Along comes FastTrack (KaZaa/Morpheus/Grokster). It's really easy to use, so everyone and their mom installs it. For a few months, users are happy. Then the RIAA takes note, orders FastTrack shutdown ... you can finish the rest.

This will keep happening until the RIAA finally gives up. Since that's rather unlikely, the cycle "sucky Gnutella -> nice GUI app -> nice GUI app shut down -> sucky Gnutella" will continue forever.

Some background on the FT network

[jquirke]

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.

OpenFT is what you seek!

[WD]

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.