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KaZaA Resumes Downloads, Company Sold?
Robert Johnson writes "According to an article on Dotcom Scoop, popular file-sharing service KaZaA may have been sold over the weekend.
"As of last week the company was based in the Netherlands. However, upon close examination of its new terms of use license, the company now says, "This License as well as all disputes arising out of or in connection with this Agreement shall be governed by the laws of the New South Wales, without regard to or application of choice of law rules or principles. Any dispute arising out of or in connection with this License, or in future agreements resulting there from, shall be exclusively resolved before the competent court in New South Wales," the article states. New South Wales is an Australian state."
Update Apparently the website reverted to the former content
which might raise a few eyebrows. Update: 01/21 18:17 GMT by T : DotcomScoop writes: "KaZaA isssued a statement regarding its sale after our story was published." Here is the statement and a little more info.
If what we've seen over the past few months are any indication (broadband woes, ridiculous internet laws), Australia's laws won't be too kind to file-sharing. Not that it will matter to P2P users, they can just move on to the newest P2P startup that hasn't been gobbled up yet.
*This page intentionally left pointless*
Very odd. Moving the company to Australia doesn't spare Niklas Zennstrom (the guy who cofounded both KaZaA and FastTrack, the company that provides the software) of any liability for his past actions in Europe, especially given that Australia is a signatory to the same international copyright treaties as everyone else. Nor would selling the company be any help, unless he could hornswoggle somebody into assuming the liabilities. That seems unlikely, given that the vicarious infringement liability that Napster is exposed to -- identical to the one risked by KaZaA -- is in the billions of dollars. An acquirer would have to be crazy to take it on, and would probably have a hard time finding hosting services (they're legally exposed, too). And the service is still up and running exactly as it was before. Very hard to figure out this one.
So sorry, we Amerikuns can't learn geography this way. Australia needs to piss us off so we bomb NSW, and then CNN can show us where it is.
This is stright from the front page of he web site:
The original brains behind Kazaa have moved on to develop new innovative software. The team now running Kazaa will continue to deliver the best technology for finding, saving and transfering all the data you want: no limits. Get ready for the next version of KaZaA with even better performance and enhanced usability. Click here to read the new Terms of Use for KaZaA.
To me, this sounds like a mass exodus, not a simple move to avoid some laws...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
6 Payment and fees
6.1 Certain features of the KaZaA Media Desktop may require payment in the future including a prepaid fee ("Prepaid Fee").
The Prepaid Fee, and all taxes and other fees related thereto will be paid by you in advance.
Guess someone in the RIAA managed to make a new acquisition, as per the leaked memo.
Okay, new game. Who wants to make acronyms for KAZAA that indicate how f*cked they are?
"You're never ready, just less unprepared."
See previous article on Somalia having it's internet service disconnected...
6 24 5
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/23/174
It would seem that the disgruntled users have decided to switch to gnutella. This chart shows that an increase of 400% overnight just occured . Shuting down a truly decentralized P2P network won't be so easy.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
No it continues to work for a current session if you didnt restart after the changeover. I noticed this on one of my two kazaa sessions on different boxen so I went to try and test to see if I could login via the other one. So I quit my 2nd sessions and then couldnt login again. I proved my point.
Then I slapped my head and said "DOH!"
* DONT terminate your running linux clients! *
they'll stay running if you dont kill them.
Someone gonna hack the protocol to do a fake insert of a hacked linux client into the network?
Kazaa is a decentralized filesharing network with a centralized login mechanism. But authentication is really enforced only in the client. As insurance against being shut down by a lawsuit, if the login servers disappear, the clients are supposed to just forget about authentication and join the network anyway, by trying to connect to any of a series of hardcoded supernodes. This list is also supposed to be refreshed whenever you connect to the network.
.kza directory every time I run kazaa or it crashes on restart; so I surely don't have a refreshed list saved.)
My guess is that the login servers are down and the linux binary's supernode list is out of date. (And I don't know about you, but I have to wipe out the whole
I further imagine that by editing in the address of a working supernode into the binary or config file somewhere, you can get the linux version to connect.
Are Windows people connecting okay?