Slashdot Mirror
KaZaa Suspends Downloads
chill writes: "'Download Temporarily Suspended -- Download of the KaZaA Media Desktop software is temporarily and voluntarily suspended pending Dutch court decision on January 31. We apologise for the inconvenience. Please check back at www.kazaa.com for more information.'
--- Both the Linux and Windows client downloads are offline. I wonder what the judge thinks this will do to the tens, if not hundreds of thousands who already have the software?"
''Never in human history has technology allowed the big to crush the small with so little effort, and never have the laws and infrastructure of the world been so set up to expedite this process. [...] In reality, the legal system is a nasty, ugly thing that unless you have a great deal of time, resources and money, you're up the creek.''
He also explores the various myths of how the system works. For example -
Myth #1: What matters is who is right. Sorry, wrong -- it matters who is willing to spend the most money proving they are "right."
- and on it goes.
I wish these guys well with their fight
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It will get a story posted on /., prompting millions of users to simultaneously fire up their existing KaZaA software to see if the network is still up, thus melting the servers and shutting down the network...
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
In the book "Microserfs", by Douglas Coupland, the writer muses (This was, by the way, in about 1993):
"Someday life will be nothing more than jail and shopping."
'Nuff said.
Sure, lots of people use Fasttrack, and the network is fairly decent (in that it sort of works sometimes), unlike Gnutella, Open Napster, and Direct Connect. But now that Fasttrack implemented a cryptographic challenge (such that no open source client can enter the network easily without cracking the code) they have shot themselves in the foot since it's easier to shut down with only one company licensing the technology. I wouldn't download Kazaa anyways, since it's loaded with sypware, 3rd party programs, and the like. Morpheus is another Fasttrack program, and it is pretty decent, although it does have ads that popup through Internet Explorer (!) and they even often have sound or shockwave, or take up the whole screen! Your best bet is to use Freenet once version 0.5 is released (really soon now) with Frost. All those who know the old, non-working Freenet will be impressed by 0.5, as it works incredibly well now.
One other thing worth mentioning: Kazaa wants you to use it so that it can make money off your processing cycles, memory, and network connection. That's right; Kazaa plans to introduce technology to allow businesses to use the Kazaa network to burden the load of distributing large quantities of data.
Well, that takes care of THAT! Piracy is finally solved. Move along now! Nothing to see here!
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
now, more than ever, it's important to open up your outgoing bandwidth when you're not actively using your machine and share the love. i recommend downloading a gnutella client too and share your files over both networks. the only thing that can keep this technology alive is selfless participation...
It is still possible to download KaZaA, a quick search found a copy here
C|Net is reporting on this, check out the article which includes a few more details that haven't been mentioned here.
forma3
A. Courts squash what they can define.
Just like America turned (rightly or wrongly) a non-nation-state terrorism incident into an old-fashioned "my country vs. yours" war, courts/governments will try and shut down companies with business models that (they argue) are based on piracy and individuals that write "harmful code".
<pessimism>
The day someone anonymously builds a true peer2peer network that scales well and people choose it ahead of something with advertising in it, the genie really will be out of the bottle. Sadly, that's when governments will decide that "anti-supply" laws we're talking about now are useless, and the "anti-demand" laws will get tougher - in essence, they'll start going after 'users' rather than 'dealers'.
</pessimism>
"If you create user accounts, by default, they will have an account type of Administrator with no password." KB Q293834
Looks like I might just have to download it from 1 of another billion locations like this one:
l
http://www.mpex.net/software/download/kazaa.htm
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
> The main problem is if the courts go after the authentication servers. This isn't happening yet.
Actually, I have read (in the leaked RIAA memo on fasttrack) that if the authentication servers are unreachable, the software will connect to the network without authenticting. It comes with a long list of peers to try connecting to, which whenever it connects. If this is true, and kazaa etc. vanish with their servers, the software should keep working.
On the other hand, I have read (in the New York Times article on video trading yesterday) that FastTrack have the ability to shut down the software remotely. And this would seem to be borne out by the time they forced everyone to upgrade to version 1.33. (Though maybe this was accomplished in the authentication process.)
This is not the case. They have taken the CLIENT software download off the website. The actual service seems unchanged.
Actually there is a central server for both Kazaa and Morpheus, but what separates it from Napster is that there isn't any file index on the server, only user authentification. Will the courts be able to get at that server? It's a harder case to argue, that's for sure...
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
Which is chump change. Telephone and communications companies make more in a year than hollywood has made SINCE THE INVENTION OF THE VCR.
Furthermore, they, as a group, have a monopoly on the creation of new fictional entertainment... Does this give you ideas?
If hollywood could (say) get even a small part of the communications (aka, the delivery) pie, they'd make more money a year than they do now.
Does this give you ideas for other sources of revenue? Make everything literally free (to download) on the internet. With, maybe, a royalty on home-user (IE, non-business) bandwidth, with statistical sampling to determine how much of that royalty should go to which entertainment industries for mass-market entertainment. Maybe add in hard drives or cd blanks. Basically, make something similar to the Audio-CDR mechanism.
After all, if they increased home telephone/communication bills by even 10% for such a royalty. 100 million people spending $100/month (cable, telephone, internet), with a 10% royalty toward entertainment production starts moving into the billions of dollars/year range.
Not only that, but suddenly there is MUCH less fighting over copyrights, hollywood doesn't have to worry about extra duplication, caues every duplication is more profit for them. It lets people do whatever they want on and with their computers.
Yeah, its annoying, and if you only backup your hard drive onto CD's, you're subsidizing brittney spears. But on the other hand, it *will* give hollywood billions and billions of dollars, and stop digital control technology.
And, in such a world, napster/gnutella/morpheus for movies would be the best thing ever for movies. 10x the bandwidth, means 10x the money coming in! Furthermore, they could make even more money from premium servers where you pay, but you get high-quality, uncorrupted, fast downloads.
The idea is to not fight humanity, but try to go along with them.
I heard about this idea, oh, about 3 years ago.
So, what do you think.
It's amazing how closely this lawsuit coincides with the release of Napshare v1.0. Napshare v1.0 being the best Gnutella client out there.
Based loosely on GTK-Gnutella, it has the best features I've seen in any type of downloader. You feed it a string to search for, the minimum file size, a string that the files SHOULD NOT contain, and the minimum server speed if you like. (someone I know *cough**cough*) personally downloaded Jurassic Park 3 and Pulp Fiction in the past 2 days since they got Napshare... and that's 700MB/piece over a SLOW cable-modem (30KBps/7KBps).
Did I mention it's been running for two days constantly, under heavy load, without any memory leaks, and not a single crash.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
What point? That there's more content freely available right now than there's ever been in the history of humankind? It's way harsh on Dmitri and Jon Johansson, but as far as the rest of us are concerned, what's the biggie?
Don't get me wrong, I think it's loathesome that content distributors can tell us to our faces that we're all guilty (of whatever new offence they want to buy with "campaign contributions"), but in practical terms, they're fighting a losing battle, and I can show you precedent. The ex-Soviet Union.
Like most truism, this one is actually true: The more they tighten their grip, the more star systems, er, customers, will slip through their fingers.
When they tell us that we're all criminals whatever we do, when they make it harder to play by their rules than to get content via P2P or on a street corner, when they try to dictate demand by controlling supply, they'll create a black market that will supply the genuine demand of you and I and Joe Public. It happened in Russia, with far tighter controls at every level of society than even the RIAA and MPAA combined can buy in the USA. The War on Piracy will be about as successful as the War on Drugs, because they are both a War on The People.
I mean, really, this is bad luck for Kazaa, but Kazaa screwed up by trying to control supply using authorisation servers. They joined the losing side there and then. If Kazaa goes under, another service will pick up the pieces, and the amount of content available will just grow and grow. The losers will be anyone who refuses to supply the demand, the winners will be you, me, Joe, and the lawyers.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
it's amazing that the _protection and preservation one's rightful property_ transformed overnight from an inalienable human right acknowledged by almost every society (though not by every political system) throughout time, into an "obsolete business practice."
Intellectual Property is a fiction, it is not property (as in tangible asset) at all. The act of creation ceases when the work is born, only in the 'intellectual property world" does a producer feel the right to control a work once he has borne it. Does a plumber call you and ask for a fee every time you flush your toilet? No, neither should a musician, actor, author or inventor ask for fees to exercise the purpose of their past creation. Meaning, that by its regular availability, the thing *has been created* and no further compensation is necessary.
If I copy a book, I am creating a book. The original author was not present or required to make my copy - why should he be compensated? If a creator feels he needs to reach some artificial economics of scale to make his time worthwhile, thats his issue -- i refuse to have *MY* liberties eroded to enforce a concept of capitalist business practice. The creator has no business telling me what I may or may not do with my own time and equipment.
Intellectual Property, (Copyright, Trademarks and Patents) have no place in an intellectually free society. Intellectual Property is a tool of economics and not a 'rightful property by inalienable human right' -- to suggest such is absolutely ridiculous. It is neither a 'right' nor a natural, self-evident thing. It is a concept, a construct, an agreement... and those who would use it as a economic hammer are no longer entitled to it.
I no longer purchase any item that would re-enforce this system. I copy all my music CDs*, I download movies and use the library for all books and magazines. I also advocate the rest of us do as well.
Ideas dont exist in a vacuum, and to suggest that a creation of the mind has a sole creat or with inalienable right to then control it is offensive to the rest of us.
* Canadians, because our government collects a fee for the RIAA types with every CDR sold, are legally allowed to make copies of Music CDs OTHERS have bought at record stores. Stop buying and burn those discs!
The US refused to show the Taliban the evidence they claim they have against bin Laden. Afganistan also has not extradition treaty with the US. The Taliban was therefore justified under international law to not extradite bin Laden.