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More on Kazaa and Brilliant Digital Spyware
Vertigo01 writes: "There is an interesting article from CNN.com on the current state of the Kazaa controversy, and Brilliant Digital's plans for the future. Interesting quotes from the article include a statement saying that 'Altnet's seeded software [will be] awakened some time in May' and that 'Brilliant is negotiating with music labels and movie studios to market their material as well. The files will be copy-protected in some way, using Microsoft's digital rights management encryption technology.'"
Most worrisome part of the article: Nikki Hemming, chief executive of Sharman Networks, advocates a copyright tax on all ISPs. So all ISP users will be forced to pay the RIAA!
And on the copying and fair use front, Hemming is lobbying Congress for an Intellectual Property Use Fee to settle the quandary of responsibility for distributing copyrighted material. The proposal calls for charging ISPs a fee to compensate copyright holders.
The IPUF would be a "universal levy that would be applied to everyone in the value chain that benefited from the content available" on the KaZaA network, Hemming says.
In an open letter to Congress, Sharman Networks writes:
"We suggest that it is time for Congress to step in and halt the 'whack-a-mole' litigation excesses of the music and movie industries through new legislative initiatives that compel content availability, while establishing a compensation scheme that requires a contribution from all the many industry sectors beyond P2P [peer-to-peer] software that benefit from content availability."