Kazaa: Happy In the Global Legal Briarpatch

Steve0987 writes "The Washington Post has an article on the entertainment industry's atempts to close down the file-sharing system Kazaa. I agree that copyrighted material shouldn't be freely distributed from an ethical standpoint. However, the entertainment industry has been acting in an arbitrary manner trying to impede anything remotely impinging on their industry. Go Kazaa."

Comments

Re:Wow, I'm actually one of the first 20 posters..

[TomHandy]

Yes, Kazaa still has spyware.

Fortunately there is a project that makes a version of Kazaa with the spyware stripped out. You can get it here: Kazaa Lite. It seems to work just fine.

I'm actually pretty impressed with Kazaa. The only real problem sometime is finding files that are mislabeled (i.e. in Kazaa they are listed as being by one artist but then when you get the actual file it turns out to be someone else).

-Tom

You're teleological ethics don't stand up

[Jayson]

The stance that you do what what most people will benefit from is what allows horrible decisions to made daily. It can be used to justify virtually any position from deporting Arab immigrants in fear of terrorism to forcing the richest 1% of of the world at gunpoint to give away their money (historically, it has been used to justify worse, like nuking Japan). Ethics is not something that you weigh on a scale.

The old scenario is imagine you were being held at gunpoint and your capturer gave you a gun and told you to kill one random person on the street. If you didn't he would kill you and ten others. You might make a policy decision to kill that person in the name of benefiting more people, and under a cost-benefit analysis model that might be a correct decision, but it isn't an ethical decision because our moral code says that we don't murder people.

The only ethical decision here to make is that you either do what artists or distibutor asks of you, or you don't. Decideding that you are going to copy somebody else's creation, even though they have asked you not to, can in no way be called an ethical decision that I can see.

I benifit more from file sharing because if there were no napsters and gnutellas of the world I simply wouldnt have the money to listen to music AT ALL, PERIOD.

Just because you benefit from something doesn't make it ethical. So you don't listen to music. I don't get it.