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

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.