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Kazaa And Exportation of U.S. Copyright Laws
Mr. Vidster writes "Interesting article in the NYTimes about the potential issues the U.S. justice system must face when dealing with Sharman Networks and KaZaA. Apparently Sharman and KaZaA have servers in Denmark, source code in Estonia, and the developers live in the Netherlands. How far does the long arm of US copyright law reach?"
P.S.: if you don't like the country's political climate, then try changing it yourself, take action, use your own vote and political self-worth. Stop sitting around crying about it. Otherwise, why don't you just move to China or Russia - they would love to have ya.
Well, lets look at Kazaa.
It's website is in English. It's software is in English, and it does not have a Norwegian version of the software and probably never will. Take a look at their Languages page. It doesn't even have plans to open a Norweigan version of their software, but yet they want to release it in Spanish, French and German? Spanish is basically the second most spoken language in the United States, not Norway. Now, if we take a look at the most common languages in Norway, we can see here and here that hardly anyone speaks English in Norway. Most speak, um, Norwegian (most common dialect is Bokmål).
So, as we can plainly see, Kazaa is targeting the US demographic, not Norway/Denmark/Estonia. Yet their servers and establishments are in Denmark? Why? It's to gain marketshare and profit from the American people, yet not contribute the US. In fact, they're taking money away from the American government. There are no US taxes on the products, so your basically throwing your money away. (Yes, Money, there is now "Kazaa Plus" which costs $$$). Kazaa's advertisments target US customers, it's product is made for US customers and it's only intrest is in the US customer base.
Kazaa is obviously not interested in P2P technology or it's future. It stole Gntuella's technology spec and re-wrote it. Kazaa also has Network Supernodes (dedicated nodes, always on) and other centralized components. So if you took those away, expect drastic changes in performance. The RIAA has pretty much presumed Kazaa was built just like that for a while. Kazaa is all about money. Take away the money, watch the developers flee. The "developers" of Kazaa have already started up similar companies. They know Kazaa will be shut down eventually, and of course they need to keep making their un-deserved millions.
Kazaa will eventually be shut down, even if it means Jennifer Gardner running out of an exploding building in the Netherlands.