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Stealware: Kazaa et al Stealing Link Commissions
goombah99 writes "We all heard about spyware, well now Kazaa, Morpheus and LimeWire are sneaking a new type of nastiness onto your computer, software that - without you even knowing it - redirects commissions for online purchases you make from other vendors you make back to them. For example, if you buy a CD from an affiliate of Amazon.com, say some charity, the software fools Amazon into crediting the commission to Morpheus, not the charity! The story quotes a LimeWire Developer who admits 'While I agree that this is really a
bit of a scam, it is a way for us to pay salaries while not adversely affecting our users.' The insidious part is the stealware
program remains even if you delete the original P2P software. And you supposedly gave your permission when you clicked through the EULA."
'While I agree that this is really a bit of a scam, it is a way for us to pay salaries while not adversely affecting our users.'
That's part of it, it does affect the users - money that they may have WANTED to go to a particular affiliate is now going to these guys. Yay.
The other part is what about the affiliate contract? doesn't this violate it?
Desperation is a stinky cologne
It's sort of a Catch-22 here. The user is using the software, agreeing to the EULA, and "illegally" (it's arguable) downloading music... What person out there would take a company to court that is allowing them to distribute and download music that a lot of the major companies don't want you to do?
I'm uneffected by this because i'm a happy WinMX user. I've never had a problem whatsoever, unlike AudioGalaxy and Bearshare (this is awhile ago) that deleted some of my system files, thus making me have to reformat!
How is this not fraud or theft?
By the way, kinda strange that you can't really BUY many of the p2p apps, but rather they come only as ad/spy ware sponsored by the same few companies. The claim that the developers need to do this to make money is thus utter BS. Make a good p2p client and sell it instead of loading it with crap.
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
Patrick Toland, a vice president for sales and marketing at TopMoxie, said that the company did not intend for its software to displace other affiliates' rights
Like so many claims surround P2P, this claim is utterly unbelievable: how do you build a program that hijacks sales and NOT know you're doing this ?
I just hope Amazon and whomever is affected by this sues their asses off.
Score: 4 - funny
WTF! This is funny it's serious and the poster is right this is dam right illegal, people are being defrauded and the government(s) should step in and shut these people down.
Do they not have any morals? How can they do this sort of thing and sleep at night?? You're STEALING money from charities FFS.
I'd imagine that Amazon et al will be chaning their contractual terms specifically preventing this sort of behavior. The whole 'affiliate' program is dependant upon the warm and fuzzy feeling one gets by helping out a site you use, giving additional sales to Amazon. If users begin to question who will get the commission, then it fails as a marketing scheme for Amazon (and the others, presumably). I don't think this will be around for long.
"And you supposedly gave your permission when you clicked through the EULA."
You may have given somebody permission as far as your browser goes but that doesn't give you the right to change a link on a persons website... You can agree all day long but it isn't *your* link nor is it *your* commission being stolen.
I find this rather repulsive but I have to admit this is rather ingenious ( in an evil scientist kind of way ). However, the fact that a user accepts it in the EULA doesn't remove the fact that they don't have a contract with the website owner giving them permission to do this.
The flipside of this is they can screw you over in any illegal way they like and there's just about jack you can do about it. It's like owing your bookie money. Because the debt CAN'T be legally enforced, you have to pay it.
The fact that the P2P software people are doing this, or the fact that most people probably don't even care?
That's why if your going to use Kazaa you should really use Kazaa Lite. It's Kazaa without all the spy stuff installed.
Ok so you are saying to not do it yourself but to endorse the community around it. If the community grows (whether from "Lite" users or not), it will be good for the Kazaa company. Do you really want to support a company that is twisting the internet in such an underhanded way? At first I was like you. They put in some spyware and they said that they would take it out (which as far as I am aware, they never did) and so I downloaded the Lite and thought 'mostly harmless'. Yet now they are showing thier true colors. The Kazaa company thinks that any underhanded way they can possibly make money is fair game in bussiness and war. I don't want to support a company with no moral standard and embraces such a corporate culture. I want the whole kazaa p2p to whither and die and to be never heard of from again.
I miss the Karma Whores.
Don't you think that that's the same thing the RIAA is saying? "how is this not stealing..."
The difference: if the software tricks Amazon into awarding affiliate sales commission to Morpheus instead of the intended recipient, the intended recipient has lost money that they would definitely have received.
When you download "See My Boobies One More Time", Britney and her record company are only being deprived of income if you would have bought the album without the P2P service. In fact, with P2P you might check out more of the album, like it, and wind up buying it when you wouldn't have done so if your only exposure was the two overplayed songs on the radio.
To sum it up, what Kazaa, etc are doing takes the money away every time. The P2P user isn't always a true financial loss to the RIAA.
Note that I'm not saying this makes copyright infringement ok, I'm saying it's a "lesser evil" than the fraud being perpetrated on Amazon affiliates.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
It may not be illegal, but it's undoubtedly immoral, and I think we should be emailing Amazon asking them to terminate their affiliate accounts. I know I will.
Want to prosecute P2P systems? Get in line...
Schnapple
IANAL but... The EULA claim is irrelevant. Even if the EULA were enforceable - which it obviously is not no contract between scumcorp and the user can affect the rights of the afilliate and Amazon.
The EULA is invalid for so many reasons it isn't funny. First no contract can in any case give a license to perform an illegal act. Second no EULA entered into through a clickwrap agreement has ever been enforced for a term remotely close to this.
But the EULA is in any case irrelevant because it is clear that Kazza is no more legit than Naster was.
Of course crooks of this type tend to be litigious and there is every chance they will bring nuisance lawsuits to try to silence their critics. I don't think it will work in this case since even the RIAA can probably see that it is in their interests to make sure that any scum lawsuits are fought.
I have argued on many occasions that the way to kill theftware is to go after their money supply. In particular make any company whose roduct is bundled with theftware liable for damages to the RIAA.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Erm, they make a program for pirating movies and music. Do you think they'll give a damn that something else they do is seen as stealing?
Actually they make a program for transfering files from machine to machine. Yes, one potential use of the program is to aid in the distribution of copywritten works (which is mostly what people use it for), but it is the users that priate the movies and music, not the program.
However, what they're doing with the commission-stealing is dispicable and most likely illegal... they should be punished for this. I'm glad I don't use any of the programs mentioned in the article.
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
Kazaa, Morpheus et. al. are a simple concept: try to take advantage of people's enourmous predisposition to violate copyright laws via digital technology to skim some cash by any means whatsoever. It's a rotten business model and a rotten way to behave and it isn't much of a surprise that the rotten people responsible for it are as dishonest to their users as they are about what their software is really used for ("now don't use this to illegally copy protected media, kids, wink wink nod nod").
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
An AC saying it's windows only with no documentation doesn't exactly satisfy me... I tried it out a few weeks back and didn't see any evidence of abuse, but then I wasn't looking for it, silly me I thought Limewire were the good guys. Grrr. I like Mldonkey a lot better anyway, but now I'm wondering if I may have gotten some bugs piggybacked on the Limewire client that I'm not even using. If anyone knows what to look for it would be appreciated...
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I would argue that furthurnet isn't moralistic (in my 2 or 3 days of using it! ;-) but rather an extension of a much older culture of tape trading. AFAIK, I believe it more or less started w/ the Grateful Dead a long time ago. People would trade copies of tapes to each other from different concerts. I have an uncle who has a wall full of em. So my guess is that they're not trying to be moralistic, but rather are simply continuing a very old tradition.
But thats my $.01 (its not worth 2)
"Of all days, the day on which one has not laughed is the most surely the one wasted." -Sebastian Roch Nicol
There you go again, thinking it's your computer. You may have laid out the cash to buy the hardware, paid the electric bill to run it, and paid someone to maintain it, but once you turned the processor over to someone elses software, your priorities took a second place to theirs.
Who's writing the software you use? What's their motivation for doing so? And how do you know you can really trust them?
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
I have been noticing for a while now that many corporate entities seem to think that their own private rules somehow take precedence over the general laws of the localities in which they operate. A quick example. My old ISP kept sending me a bill in the mail for a yearly subscription to their services that I had not used in months and had decided not to renew. I finally called up and asked them why they kept sending me a bill. Their reply was that THEIR POLICY was to renew subscriptions automatically (fortunately, they didn't have my credit card number or I would have had to jump through all kinds of hoops to get out from under them). To which I calmly replied that it was MY POLICY not to expect to be billed for items and services that I hadn't requested. The above mentioned attitude of the writers of user agreements that they can specify any old nonsense they want is just a special case of the general tendency of modern companies and institutions to try to write their own rules in complete disregard for the laws of the land. This goes for the ubiquitous rent-a-cops who parade around with guns pretending to be law enforcement officers.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
What do you expect. They feel like their userbase are all criminals so they don't care about abusing them.
Not much different of an attitude from the RIAA.
Downloading MP3'is not stealing. Is this Ms. Rosen in disguise or has her little campaign worked so well? Downloading MP3's is the a sort of nonviolent resistance to their vicious empire, if you want to be picturesque, but it ain't stealing.
It's not the tool that does the deed, it's the user. Don't blame the tool, that's just stupid.
Home Page
And all the while, the artist who actually created the MUSIC that all of you are taking gets NOTHING.
Does this strike anyone else as wrong?
If you want to use P2P, go ahead, but don't be surprised that the system breaks down if no one is paid by anyone.
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What really gets me is their claim that this diversion of cash doesn't hurt the customer. Sure, it doesn't cost the customer any more money, but most of the sites that have funds diverted away from them are small, special-interest sites that provide their content for free, and use that income to pay for their bandwidth. If that money dissappears, then the sites dissappear as well, and voila, the customer is now hurt. I certainly don't want *my* favorite sites dissappearing just because some amoral jackass decided he needs the money more than they do.
Seems to me that language could be faulted for not explicitly stating that revenue from the purchase will accrue to Kazaa, not the original affiliate. By itself, that might support civil action. Certainly seems deceptive by omission.
As others have noted, language in a EULA stating that the user agrees to commit an illegal act does not legitimize the act or absolve anyone from legal liability.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
on March 20 of this year, I wrote the following letter to Robin Gross of EFF expressing my dismay and anger at the activities of these spyware companies.
Dear Ms. Gross
I am writing to express my concern that my attempts to financially support EFF have been stolen by Morpheus and similar companies. I have long been careful to use the Amazon Affiliate Button on your front page for all of my book purchases. I have felt that doing this combined to support what I believe in simply and effectively. Since my purchases have been well over $1000 per year for at least the last two years, I know that it has to have been worth at least some money to EFF.
It has recently become apparent that Morpheus et al. have been placing software such as TopText and other scumware on users machines. These programs have the sole purpose of rewriting affiliate links. This effectively redirects the financial benefits of these links to the scumware operators. To put it bluntly, this is theft, no different than if they had stolen the affiliate checks and written their own names as payee.
I have supported the EFF for years. I supported Morpheus partly because of EFF's support of them. But I am frankly disgusted by this turn of events. As the Director of the Campaign for Audiovisual Free Expression, and a staff attorney for EFF for Fair Use and Intellectual Property, I believe that you may well be the single best person to let them know they have gone too far. To take a principled stand on Fair Use is one thing. To pump ads to users while using the software is also perfectly legit. To actively steal revenue from other people, companies and organizations, even after the user has supposedly removed the software, without notice is simply beyond comprehension.
Shortly thereafter, I recieved this reply from Robin
Thanks for your message and concern. We've been informed that was a very brief test and has been completely disabled. If the company wishes to do this in the future, they will be sure permissions are granted in advance of rerouting trafficking. Best, Robin
Perhaps Robin needs to revisit this issue with these scumbags.
mithras wrote:
> And all the while, the artist who actually created
> the MUSIC that all of you are taking gets NOTHING.
>
> Does this strike anyone else as wrong?
Yes, it is very wrong that the record labels steal the copyrights from the artists (using a "work for hire" law).
It is very wrong that the artists are so bound by contract that they cannot even use their own voices - they belong to the record labels.
It is very wrong that they are bound for an undetermined amount of time (by the number of albums which may never be produced), during which the label profits. In the end, the artists frequently are in debt.
The real thieves here are the labels that steal from the artists, and P2P companies that steal from charities. The kiddies that trade files are in gross violation of copyright law, but they probably wouldn't be buying many CDs anyway.
> If you want to use P2P, go ahead, but don't be
> surprised that the system breaks down if no one
> is paid by anyone.
The system as it stands is in desparate need of breaking down. The five major labels that have a strangle hold on the music industry need to be replaced - with small businesses that serve the artists. Then the artists can hold their own copyrights, make the profits they deserve, and the customer can have fair prices at last.
"They bind our hearts: 'Let's sell them again and again!'
Our plan understands the sea; we can wait for her coming."
From the song "Infanto no Musume" in the Japanese version of "Mothra" (1961).
On the other hand, if you terminate the license by removing the P2P software, the stealware is still active. At that point, regardless of whether the EULA is legal and enforceable, it's now fraud or theft.
And no, we don't need new "digital" laws to cover this, existing laws cover it very nicely.
ObIANAL: IANAL
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
This is like them walking into someone else's store, setting up a cash register, and taking money for someone else's product. In the case of an Amazon associate, the "product" is not the product the consumer purchased, it's the referral that Amazon purchased from the associate. This they are stealing.
Anyone who is an Amazon associate (or an associate for any other company they're doing this with) should complain to Amazon.com (maybe make a petition) and have these people's associates account cancelled. I'm sure going to!
Convert RSS to HTML - integrate webfeeds into your website
I hate to burst your bubble, but you are completely incorrect.
The reason why I got broadband is NOT for P2P.
- I like being able to work from home. It's not really possible via dialup.
- I like to be able to play multiplayer games online. Something about a 1200+ ping just makes it less fun.
- I like being able to download my LEGIT things at a decent speed.
Believe it or not, some of us just like to be fast. Do I need the connection 24/7? No, but shared between a roommate and myself, the cost equals just a little higher than a single dialup account for me would be. So why does this necessarily equate that broadband = P2P thief?
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
Once again, a contract that "allows" one to commit an illegal act as part of the contract terms is not legally binding.
In this case, while the KaZaa EULA might "authorize" them to intercept the grant from your side (whether you read it or not), I'm pretty sure they did not get the permission from the party on the other side to do the same thing...
They aren't really ripping the KaZaa users off, but they are defauding the other parties they are denying the $$$ to.