Kazaa Continues to Evolve

Zephy writes "The New York Times (free registration etc.. ) has an article about a new partnership between Kazaa, and Tiscali, the European internet access provider. Seems that Kazaa will carry ads for Tiscali's broadband services in return for a cash 'bounty' when a user signs up for broadband. To quote the article, 'This gives legitimacy to KaZaA.' Also, Cnet has an article about the new Kazaa version which has features designed to help users avoid corrupt or wrong files such as those spread around p2p by the MP/RIAA."

Comments

wow

[laserjet]

Here's the main gist of the article, boiled down into a single rock:

"Under the deal, KaZaA's owner, Sharman Networks Ltd., will advertise high-speed Internet access provided by Tiscali, an Italian Internet provider, to its tens of millions of European users. In return Tiscali, which serves around seven million customers in 15 countries, will pay Sharman a "bounty" for each KaZaA user who signs up for its high-speed access service."

Seems like an OK move for both companies, but I think there are so few people that actually look at and consider banner ads that it won't do much good. On the plus side, Kazaa gets another partner.

It does seem a bit funny that a high speed ISP would partner up with a file-sharing company that eats up all their bandwidth. While some ISPs are figuring out how to ban them, others are joining with them. I hope they have a lot of bandwidth to spare.

Interesting developments

[Scarblac]

There are several interesting developments here. For one thing, Tiscali allies with Kazaa - a natural step for them, because after all, they want to sell bandwidth, and why would people need a lot of bandwidth, if there weren't any applications like Kazaa?

Then in the second article, one of the things that's mentioned is that they partner with a music company for which Kazaa is actually the only way it distributes its music. This may be good for Kazaa's legal case, after all Napster seemed to lose mostly because they couldn't show that their networks were used legitimately at all.

On the other hand, I wonder what the judge will think of the new feature against 'bogus music and video files', that are inserted by the record companies to make the network useless. Almost all of those files will make themselves look like songs that are actually illegal to trade, so making a feature to stop them, however useful and natural to make, could be seen as actively helping to download copyrighted stuff.

But I can't really see them winning the case in the US anyway, after Napster.

Re:Interesting developments

[jbolden]

Then in the second article, one of the things that's mentioned is that they partner with a music company for which Kazaa is actually the only way it distributes its music. This may be good for Kazaa's legal case, after all Napster seemed to lose mostly because they couldn't show that their networks were used legitimately at all.

The problem is there are much better ways to distribute legal stuff than Kazaa. A rootless peer to peer setup involves enormous networking overhead (over 1/2 the packets) that you wouldn't have with the standard download systems. I think almost all anonymous peer-to-peer file shares are going to face this problem; if what was being distributed was legal you wouldn't go to this much trouble.

I think the best thing for Kazaa would be to get political stuff of an extremely non mainstream nature: everything from KKK literature to communist party literature to anarchist stuff to taliban philosophy to Turner diaries traffic to taiwanese indepence writings ... That way there is a good reason to be doing in anonymously and at the same time its highly protected. The downside is you might end up attracting enemies more powerful than the MPAA and RIAA.

Re:How odd that an ISP wants warez kiddies

[SirSlud]

Maybe Tiscali recognizes that if Kazaa has been downloaded 120 million times, there can't be that many Kazaa users that are full blown warez kiddies.

Most of the people I know who p2p (I don't out of sheer laziness, but then again, I've stopped buying music due to the crappiness of product right now) were not bandwidth guzzling warez monkeys but just wanted a recording of a top 40 song that they could have taped off the radio twice an hour anyhow.

So maybe Tiscali sees p2p as broadband's killer app, and has taken a more objective analysis of how their bandwidth will be affect by this partnership rather than just assuming that they'll only attract the types who throttle the pipe.

Re:The clock is ticking

[NineNine]

What I'm wondering, and I've asked this before, is is there any way for the RIAA to "shut down" Fasttrack? Is Fasttrack as distributed as they say it is? If there were servers for the RIAA to attempt to shut down, is it enough to shut down all of the Fasttrack network?

Re:I take it from the summary...

[ncc74656]

FYI... if you use Ad-Aware to remove the spyware components of Kazaa, it kills the program.

IIRC, Kazaa needs Cydoor to run. Fortunately, there's a dummy Cydoor DLL available. (Can't say that I've used Kazaa or Kazaa Lite in a while, though...I started running Shareaza recently, which is spyware-free, ad-free, and works with a true decentralized network.)

Re:The clock is ticking

[Planesdragon]

1: It's "wanton", not "wonton."

2: FedEx and other true "Common Carriers" have no way to tell that the contents of one wrapped package are illegal--and if they do (i.e., it's got a "do not export" label on the outside and is being shipped to Iraq), they've probably allready been sued to stop & check.

VCR recorders were declared legal because a significant legal use was declared--and then followed through on. What's the significant legal use of KaZaa, again?

Re:Finally

[gabec]

so what's to keep the MPAA from making a bunch of profiles and then going around marking legitim...err.. uh... appropriately named files... as fakes?