Slashdot Mirror
Kazaa Admits to Morpheus Shutdown
An Anonymous Coward writes: "KaZaa yesterday admitted to CNET that it was behind the shutout of Morpheus from the FastTrack network. Their reason? The company didn't pay its bills. Still, there has to be more to it than that for KaZaa to cut them off so quickly and unexpectedly, especially since a P2P network's power lies in the size of its audience. There is some weird cat-and-mouse play going on here that can only be damaging to both sides in the upcoming trial against the RIAA and MPAA in California."
Why does everything corporate have to be this big conspiracy? If a company wasn't paying its bills is it really all that surrising that they were shut down?
You are receiving this message because your browser supports Slashdot Sigs and you have Slashdot Sigs enabled.
by shutting down morpheus, they just admitted that they have control over their network and users. now they're screwed in terms of legal defense. meanwhile, morpheus switches to gnutella and will probably survive the onslaught.
how ironic...
Somewhere on this page I have hidden my signature.
Kazaa is just a minute away from getting completely shut down. They've just admitted to the RIAA that it is possible to shut somebody out of their (nasty) proprietary network... putting them into the same boat as Napster, as far as a Judge will be concerned with them.
Mopheus, who is now using the restamped Gnucleus software, is on a true P2P network, and it would be next to impossible to shut them down.
I suspect that Morpheus will be around long after Kazaa is a footnote.
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
Morpheus didn't pay the bills and KaZaa called them on it. Morpheus' CEO sounds like a real egomaniac from his comments in the news and on their website and I'm betting he figured he'd wait til they turned him off and then blame THEM and try to make KaZaa look like the assholes.
Obviously he knew about non-payed bills and the apparent chance of being shutdown otherwise they wouldn't have has a Gnutella client all developed and ready for release within a few days.
If someone at Morpheus is reading this pass it on to your CEO and tell him that treating partners like this doesn't make anyone want to work with your company and makes him look like a prick.
I have no affiliation with either company and am strictly speaking as an outsider having dealt with people and situations like this. Is anyone else sick of this ego crap?
And by locking Morepheus out of the network, Kazaa proved that the network isn't really a true P2P network, and that you can shut it down if order to by a court of law. Good job guys... No, it's still true P2P, it's just not truely decentralized, which I'm sure is what you meant anyway
Kazaa, et al DOES NOT have control over the network. The only thing they control is the authentication mechanism. Once you're authenticated, you have complete, unfettered access to the network and Kazaa has no control over what you do/don't share.
With Napster, it was different since Napster *did* control what files were/weren't shared. With fast track, however, all they can control is whether or not you get on the network. So (and IANAL) as long as they can show that there are legitimate uses for the fast track network, I will be surprised if they get shut down.
To liken it to the Betamax court case that everyone likes to toss around, Sony had control over whether or not you could buy a VCR, but once you owned that VCR, Sony had no control over what you could or couldn't record.
Gentoo Linux http://gentoo.org/
The only problem with Morpheus using their own cool tech is that... well, they have none. They just put interface buttons in Gnucleus and called it their own. Hell, they didn't even bother to change all the dialog boxes containing info such as "please restart Gnucleus" to "Please restart Morpheus". Ever wonder why Kazaa and Morpheus looked exactly the same? Its because they were. Morpheus is basically just selling add space in a program they've renamed as their own.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
You didn't once mention Gnucleus , the fine open source structure that Morpheus lifted to keep up there ad revenues.
I bet $100 you work for Morpheus.
Face it people, name it Morpheus, name it Kazaa, name it something else.
What shuts such network down?
It's the money, always.
Who is pissed off in the end?
The user, always.
So, what is the solution to all this?
Gnutella, always.
I know, my post sounds something like a troll, but please, think about it.
Let's all migrate to gnutella, fire up you favourite client and let's start sharing.
We will se how gnutella scales, how it evolves. I think if we all pull over to the only true p2p architecture, we will shut out the MPAA the RIAA and all other stuff that bothers us.
Yes, maybe people with 56k modems won't be very happy with this. But to speak in the words of a modern time, the collateral damage is everywhere.
And as time goes on, everybody is going to be on a better connection.
So, let's shape up, put your middle finger in the air and use gnutella...
Just my 0.02
Aparently, for all the ./ people that are such OSS and GPL advocates, that you don't seem to understand that they aren't STEALING anything. They took the open source code, modified it for their needs, relabeled it, and distributed it WITH the source code.
Now granted, Gnucleus might be 'better' software, depending on your point of view. I think it was a great idea for a company that had to make due in a pinch. If the developers don't like it, don't give away the source. Go to work at M$ or some other 'evil' corporate software maker.
OK, deep breaths. They are 100% compliant with the GPL license, as I think the reporting debacle on here showed. Do we say that every commercial X/GNU/Linux distro "rips off" Linus, and GNU and KDE/Gnome and a whole load of other developers? No, we say that they promote them, bring them to a wider audience, support and develop them, and contribute their revenues back to the whole.
So let's give Morpheus enough rope to hang themselves. If they spend their ad money developing the client, and if they keep releasing source, and if they don't bring an assload of hurt to the whole project, then they'll be providing the same service as a commercial linux distro.
Do I think that'll happen? No, based on their past behaviour, I think they'll fork off a version that will refuse to serve content to other Gnutella clients while still leeching from them, flat out refuse to release the source, and bring the Men In Black to the party. But let's give them a little time to prove their guilt please.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Spyware in Morpheus? Do you have a cite for that?
Well, I've heard it rumored quite a few times, but now I just did some research and it seems nobody has been able to prove that morpheus had spyware. So I stand (sort of) corrected. I say sort-of because there was unexplained suspicious activity from the program (.dat files containing user's data that morpheus shouldn't be storing, etc) and because the program itself did (as admitted on the morpheus website) allow someone to change their users' registry settings. That alone makes the software unsafe and almost spyware-ish. Bottomline is, I still wouldn't trust the company. (and, afaik, running any fasttrack client runs some KaZaA code, and deceptive advertising is their whole bussiness model)
__
Choose mnemonic identifiers. If you can't remember what mnemonic means, you've got a problem. - Larry Wall
...when they claim that the P2P technology that they use cannot be interrupted or stopped by legal means since it is decentralized, out of thier control, blah, blah, blah...
MPAA/RIAA/whatever response - "you did it to Morpheus, now do it to yourselves"
Bye bye KaZaA... nice knowin' ya!
Each company has contended that the networks are wholly decentralized, and that the companies could not exert any control over computer users' actions. But the failure of Morpheus' network appeared to indicate that at least one control point existed that would allow part of the network to be shut down. The RIAA reacted to this development quickly last week. "We have been saying all along that they control the system, and this proves it," RIAA Senior Vice President Matt Oppenheim said in a statement last week.
:-P
looks like someone just shot themselves in the foot... napster all over again..
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
IANAL, so instead of arguing the point, I present this post as a list of expert opinions which contradict Rogerborg's position.
According to the EFF, this list of fair use activities is "not to be construed as exclusive or limiting in any way."Current national security advisor Condoleezza Rice authored a paper on fair use in 1988, in which she states "The concept of fair use is necessarily somewhat vague when discussed in the abstract. Its application depends critically on the particular facts of the individual situation. Neither the case law nor the statutory law provides bright lines concerning which uses are fair and which are not."
As mentioned in the previous post, the Sony vs. Universal City Studios Case contradicts Rogerborg's black-and-white interpretation of section 107, as it defines time-shifting television programs as fair use.
Previous case law has held that the following are fair uses of copyrighted materials:
Making personal backups of software.
Time-shifting television programs.
Format-shifting.
Compilation creation ("mix tapes")
Rebroadcasting radio in a business.
In short, a wide body of experts seem to disagree with the viewpoint espoused by Rogerborg. I exhort you to consider this when reading his posts. I further ask that you consider that he was willing to defend his viewpoint so vehemently in spite of the contradictory expert viewpoints readily available.