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Kazaa Conundrum -- The Plot Thickens
Robotech_Master writes "The ever continuing Kazaa controversy just keeps getting better. This article on Wired highlights Brilliant Digital Entertainment, the company that brokered Kazaa's sale to the Australian firm, and indicates that the RIAA is investigating them."
So that whenever they refer to me in the press articles I'd always be lauded for my intellectual acheivements! :D
(e.g. When the two ran into legal trouble at home and in the United States, Brilliant Digital CEO Kevin Bermeister, set up a meeting with Nikki Hemming, CEO of Australian's Sharman Networks venture firm.)
Thanks,
--
Matt
When the various file-sharing networks can't even get along. Morpheus is down already!
It seems like the piracy industry is falling to the same problems the RIAA did - greed.
Surprisingly, the article doesn't touch upon the implication on the www.musiccity.com (Morpheus) website that the Kazaa folks had something to do with the DOS attack.
I guess Kazaa is too busy with other lawsuits to worry about a slander case.
(BTW, the previously posted spyware remedies for Grokster work with Kazaa as well).
With the current legal landscape, the RIAA will probably win if they choose to sue any of the companies involved (assuming, of course, if they can exercise jurisdiction!). The long and short of it is that Kazaa will be viewed similarly to Naster, and so Brilliant Digital will probably be seen as contributing to that "problem".
"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." -- Carl Sagan, Cosmos
You can go to Add/Remove programs and kill it, but in true crapware tradition it doesn't actually delete the files. Go into the system folder and you'll find a bunch of DLLs prefixed with 'bde', both DLLs and EXEs. Delete them. (make sure you don't kill anything that belongs to the Borland Database Engine if you have it installed - check the DLL versions). There are two EXEs with fuzzy green icons.
Next, under the windows folder there will be a directory called 'BDE', IIRC. Delete that too.
Finally, go into the registry and look for the 'bde' and 'brilliant' strings. After verifying that they're not something else, delete those too.
The removal doesn't seem to affect the kazaa client at all.
The more star systems will slip through its fingers.
(+1 Bad Starwars Reference)
The RIAA is 'investigating' this company? Regardless of Brilliant Digital Entertainment's ethics or motives, the RIAA is not a governmental body and is acting like it has the power of subpeona.
All this is going to do is create new Morpheuses. Sure, they went to Gnutella rather than FT, but ended up contributing source back to the Gnutella project. It may be mostly GUI source, but User Interface is something that most open source projects are usually a little lacking in. I haven't looked at the source yet, but maybe they added one or two improvements into the way Gnutella files are transmitted that will now make it into other open source filesharing projects.
By forcing their 'enemies' underground, the RIAA is cutting off its own fingers.
Three cheers for Nullsoft for creating an unstoppable monster! Three cheers for all the people who've built and expanded upon Gnutella ever since, including Morpheus.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
From m-w.com:
Main Entry: [2] ape
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): aped; aping
Date: 1632
: to copy closely but often clumsily and ineptly
synonym see COPY
.sig: file not found
As much as I want to respect the copyright on software, how can the average person who wants to fiddle with Photoshop afford $1000 for the program? Perhaps people would actually buy the software if companies started making prices more reasonable, and the licenses a little less restrictive (hint, hint MS)
That may not be too far from the truth.
I haven't been able to find any MP3s I've been looking for, for months now. Sure the P2P services still exist, but if the content isn't there they they are totally useless. Even right after the demise of Napster, the vast selection wasn't there anymore. Sure you'll have no problem finding the hits, but who wants to find them anyway when you could just turn on the radio?
Maybe I'm looking for stuff that is just too obscure though?
Call me old fashioned, but I always thought that music might belong to people that created, for example, maybe.... The artists?
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
I stopped trying to download Mp3s months ago, the only stuff that was available was stuff released in the last 6 months or so, and it was just plain easier to stick a half dozen good streaming radio stations in Winamp and listen to that. I still have a small list of Mp3s so that I can listen to a few songs I really like that don't get radio play, but now for the most part I use p2p to pirate movies so I don't have to shell out cash to the damn DVD consortium.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
I bet they eventually sue ISPs. Common-carrier defense or no, they'll be a target. By not blocking 'x' ports, they are willfully facilitating copyright infringement by their user base. Or even universities, for allowing students to violate copyright with government funded networks.
After that, it'll be individual users. A few high profile examples of Gnutella users with 40GB of music shared from an always-on cable connection being carted off to jail in cuffs, and that'll scare the pants off some people.
It's gonna get ugly. The RIAA should get the ATF to raid the homes. That'd be good tv.
Software Wars
Download the acclaimed Ad Aware program here. It searches your registry and all your drives for running and installed spyware programs. It works great.
Brilliant Digital and Sharman have common employees. There is a definite financial link between the two. Look at the whois for sharmannetworks.com, and note the owner -- Phil Morle. Now, look at his site, creations.morle.com, and check out his employer.
Now that you're on the Brilliant Digital site, check out their 'Anti-Piracy Statement':
BDE has embedded proprietary encryption technology capable of tracking all copyright infringements.
Combine that with their known partners -- Time Warner among them -- and you have a possible international conspiracy...
Now we know why the RIAA wanted laws changed to allow them to hack p2p networks. Of course, they never did get it passed....
Fast Track associated spyware can still be removed by several utilities. Rather than hunting down each .DLL, you should simply download and run one of the utilities (which will clean out your system registry as well as .DLL and executables).
One good place for information is here, and a good utility by Lavasoft is available here.
I have not yet installed the new Morpheus client, but a report I read said that at least the latest Kazaa client is still installing these, even with the checkboxes for installing Gator, etc., left empty.
(email addr is at acm, not mca)
We are Number One. All others are Number Two, or lower.
--The Sphinx
Alright, RIAA, we give up! Where can I drop off my $10/month for Napster? We totally promise not to work on any underground schemes to subvert your pay-per-music system(s).
------
Today's Top Deals
Sharman Network/Brilliant Digital/KaZaA have finally responded to accusations that they were behind the attack on Morpheus. In an interview with the LA Times a spokeswomen for KaZaA, Kelly Larabee, said the company had nothing to do with Morpheus' network problems adding that we have no reason to have them go away. We'd rather them stay on FastTrack.
E-music has such great talent. Here's their top sellers:
1 Creedence Clearwater Revival
2 Carlin, George
3 Evans, Bill
4 Reinhardt, Django
5 Academy Of St. Martin-In-The-Fields Under Neville Marriner
6 Monk, Thelonious
7 Armstrong, Louis
8 Acosta, George
9 Bad Religion
10 They Might Be Giants (TMBG)
I'm not saying these aren't great, but you get the feeling that not everything is available on their service.
On the other hand, Stacey Kent is free on MP3.com, and is perhaps the best singer in the world - try "You are There".
-
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
So how does downloading music for free respect the rights of the artists who created it?
Well it does, to roughly the same degree as downloading legally purchased music from RIAA sites as documented here. If only every fourth music enthusiast were to send the artists one penny, the artists would still come out way ahead siding with the copyright violators than they would siding with the music cartels. If only one in four hundred send the artists a dollar using fairtunes, the artists come out ahead.
So called music pirates have nothing on the media cartels when it comes to causing the artist direct. verifiable, and potent financial harm, indeed based on the corrilation of P2P usage and CD sales, quite the opposite.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The judge decides to install Kazaa on his laptop to see how it works, then the judge cannot get rid of the damned monkey. Then he sentences the monkey to life in prison.
for proving that your "P2P" network really is centrally controlled. That was quite a stunt, kicking all those Morpheus users off, then trying to lure them back into the network to use Kazaa.
I really hope the majority of people see right through this, choose Morpheus(and therefore gnutella), and I hope this gets fast track shut down.
Its not true P2P if someone can flip a switch and cut everyone off. P2P is supposed to have no central control so when these programs become illegal(and there's no doubt they will shut them down if they can) they will live on because the network will still be there, and hopefully the project will also still be there living on in some enlightened country without industry sponsored politicians and the DMCA.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Patience now, once they grow up and mature, they'll produce terrific music. Can't say how much time it'll take them though :)
With the death of Napster, we saw the influx of several better mechanisms for getting music. Gnutella provided more anonymity, Morpheus and friends provided more filetypes, and Audiogalaxy provided more convenience.
It's time for the current, shoddy, slow networks based around central servers to die, however. Too many duplicate, badly named files, too many incompletes, and that evil necessity of downloading from a particular person instead of just downloading a particular file.
I hope that with the eventual death of these amateurish networks we will see the rise of something more robust that makes my porn downloading less of a chore.
I'm sharing a complete library of Philip Glass's CDs at the moment (FastTrack/Grokster, and including .ac3 from the DVD-A version of Koyaanisqatsi), and a substantial portion of Samuel Barber's output, all nine Beethoven symphonies, .mp3s of the recent DG Opera releases on DVD (which are PCM only, boo hiss), maybe two dozen other .ac3 files. That's um... a little over 22GB, by itself, out of the 900GB of porn/classical mp3s I'm sharing.
;)
Of course, anyone who wants to download from my congested sub-28.8 internet connection is more than welcome.
Live? Man I wish. I've tried using standard tape. Everything sounds like crap. I have a live recording of Glass's "Beauty and the Beast" - taped when his touring production visited my university in 1995. I'd love to clean up enough to put online... sigh.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
The new Morpheus is assumed to have spyware and tracking built into it, right? Well... It's GPL'd and the source code is available... So... _IS_ there tracking?
On a related note, how do we know that the source code available is actually the same that was used to compile the binary version available for download?
Music is not software, you can't give it away... especially when it technically belongs to someone else.
Especially nothing.
You CAN give music away, EXCEPT when it belongs to someone else.
Don't tell me you really believe I can't record a song and give it to anyone I damn well please... If it's my song, or if the copyright owner wants it to be free, then I can give it away all I want.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
but now for the most part I use p2p to pirate movies so I don't have to shell out cash to the damn DVD consortium
[Sarcasm mode on]
Yeah, that damn DVD consortium, ripping everyone off by making DVDs available to anyone for less than the cost of a CD. All DVDs should be $1. Then I'll stop pirating their stuff.
[/Sarcasm mode off]
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
I dunno, when I wanted to check out the new Alanis Morisette album on Gnutella I used Bearshare and downloaded half of the cd a week before it was released in the U.S. Based on what I heard I went and bought it the Tuesday it came out.
It seems that the Gnutella network has most of what I'm looking for, unless it's porn. A sad, sad lack of quality of porn. Still have to go to IRC for that.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I don't care about the money. But unless my facts or horribly mangled they are the ones who are responsible in one fashion or another for the region encoding on the DVDs.
And if it's not them, it's the MPAA and I pirate movies to avoid paying them anything as well.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Photoshop Elements. As far as I've seen from reading the box in the local CompUSA, its Photoshop without the nice print stuff like CMYK. Same interface, same core set of image tools and plugins.
Bleh!
As far as your (and other peoples') argument that they wouldn't make as much money if they sold Photoshop for $50 - take a look at the guy who invented the Ginsu knife! Sure, they could charge $100s just like Heinkel or Chicago, but they only charged like $20 for a complete set of knives. They made *millions* by selling *lots* of knives at $20. Adobe could make a lot more money by selling *lots* of licenses for Photoshop @ $50 than they do now at $1000/license.
...just like I feel that BMWs and Mercedes-Benz autos are to expensive for the value.
First, I'd like to challenge that idea. Provide me with data on how much Ginsu knives made, they may not have made as much money after all of the television advertizin' they bought.
Second, there is an issue with your comparison to Heckels, Chicago, or Onan knives and mail-order Ginsu. Once again, one is professional grade, one is consumer grade. The differences between a drop forged steel knife and a serrated stainless are more than insignifigant. It is better, so it is priced higher. Whether you feel the cost warrants a personal value enough to be worth it, that is your decision.
Photoshop is a professional product, that requires professional feedback, developmet, and tool sets... unfortunately, that costs buku bucks to get done. Obvious Asian Rim piracy aside, it is a professional tool for professionals. It has professional costs, it also has professional development costs... and it functions well. So therefore it goes at professional prices. If it cost triple, people would buy it because it is indespensible, the true hallmark of its value.
As far as software goes, it is good, and worth the money... so therefore it has a high price.
Classic supply and demand.
I would like it cheaper too to own it. But there is a reason it costs so much.
I'd be willing to bet more than a few dollars on the fact that Adobe, not unlike the music industry, benefits greatly from piracy. People learn Photoshop, and they go on to foster the de facto standard that is Adobe Photoshop in the commercial graphics design realm.
IANAAdobeTROLL, but the reason why photo is so good is that from a design standpoint, it is practically transparent... meaning easy to learn and operate. Most other "inferior" programs are designed off of their principles, therefore this need to learn argument needs work.
is it just me or does anyone else remember the days of sneeking around to swap files on a BBS? FTP's still do exist right??
When exactly did it become socially acceptable to launch multimillion dollar corperations based on Pirating Music/Software/Pornography ??? I'm not trying to be a hipocrit or anything cause my MP3/Warez/Porn collection could impress even the geekiest of geeks, but if I opened a "Stolen Goods & Porn Store" and advertised it on TV, I would be expecting a knock on the door from the police.
People will always :
1.Burn red lights
2.Lie to the IRS (Revenue Canada)
3.Steel Music
The idea is that you don't go around announcing it to everyone !!