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Shutting down Kazaa
An anonymous reader writes "There is an interesting wired.com article on the fight between the world's media corporations and Kazaa. The lengths Kazaa has gone to to keep itself immune from attack (incorporated variously in Vanuatu (where?), Estonia and Australia), seem to have largely paid off - until now."
It's hard to condemn someone and still profit from their popularity.
Not that i like pirating at all. In fact its one of the biggest habit holding people back from adopting open source. If poeple had to pay the fantasy prices they would be alot swifter to use open source instead of pirating. Likewise pirating is bad for independant artists and cheap labels that nobody cares about. People dont pay so they dont care about lower proces.
Still, trying to stop pirating is totally fruitless. Next in line is shadow networks where no one is tracable. To stop one of those is next to impossible. A filter at each ISP can do the trick but it would be an enourmous task to get that implemented in every country. When its filtered just send your packets in some other protocol like vpn or ssh etc. even if they succeed stopping pirating alltogheter over the internet people still will exchange cds and dvds like back in the 90s but with new types of media.
The cost of stopping pirating is just to big and they should spend that money on relations and better products instead of fitghting the windmills.
HTTP/1.1 400
even if they're not sharing anything (which is evil in itself)
If not sharing is considered evil, and a fellow new to movie trading has nothing to share, then for a fellow without a DVD-ROM drive or the video mastering expertise to make a good DivX rip, how is it possible to download one's first movie from Overnet without appearing "evil"?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Since when did dialup users contribute in a worthwhile way to P2P? They are slow to upload to and generally dont share anything either.
Do you dare to guess what percent of the files you "trade" on these networks, that is, you either download or let others download, is _legal_? As in: the original copyright holder has given permission for the file in question to be redistributed (at least in its original form). Is that 10%, 1%, 0.1%? And please do not sprout that crap about "I own the CD/DVD/program/book". The fact that you are letting 100s of other people download it makes it as ilegal. And please do skip the crap about "I'm just sampling what's out there, I delete the files after I figure I don't like them or buy the original if I do".
/. is running the story in the first place. Kazaa facilitates ilegal sharing of copyrighted materials. It should have been shut down long ago. I don't care if you like or don't like the law. It is the law we've got and you can start by sticking to it. If you don't like it, change it. Let people in countries where there's no such laws live a happy life.
Do you dare give a real figure?
I really don't see why
You mean that it is important to you to preserve the integrity of copyrighted material downloaded from these networks? What about the integrity of the copyright holder? What is he getting from you?
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I refuse to create an account
It's mostly Linux users apparently
Last time I checked, it didn't even build on Windows. This has changed. I don't think many Windows users are willing to 1. download all of giFT's dependencies, which include SSH, CVS, Cygwin, Cygwin Xfree86, Perl, the Ogg libraries, and more; 2. learn how to use Cygwin; 3. configure the dependencies; and 4. compile giFT when they could just go on kazaalite.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I read these sorts of posts as a "leave my playground alone!" sort of petulant rant justifying why P2P is inevitable so therefore they should just suck it (and people have been spewing this trash since the Commodore 64 and disc duping, berating how copy protection is just a waste and technologically the business model is failing.)
Here's a thought for you, though: Next year there are zero movies and zero commercial music releases. Before you hurrah about how great that would be for the world as all of the independent acts with "much more talent" comes to the forefront, take a peek at your current collection of video and music files. I'll bet a pretty good coinage that it's all Dixie Chicks, Britney Spears and n'Sync. Such is the nature of the horribly hypocritical pro-P2P community: Giveme givem giveme, but can your failing business model. Good old tragedy of the commons playing out on the P2P networks.
Here's another thought for you -- When big music and big movies fail at thwarting P2P "at the top", they will, and this is a guarantee, start booting in doors and arresting/suing Joe Average for running Limewire and grabbing what appears to be a copyright movie or song. Before you rant about how technologically they couldn't do that, realize that they could with no trouble at all: Tracking down P2P users would be absolutely trivial. Contrary to the YRO sentiment believed on Slashdot, the majority of the general populace would support such actions if presented with big media's side of things.
i like the blurb where they said that kazaa made millions without spending any money on content. the same could be said of ebay or fedex.
i've never used p2p services, but from a high level kazaa is like a directory service. maybe it does some caching, anonymizing and other kinds of negotiation, but on the whole it's major selling point is that it hooks up different classes of users: producers (well, maybe "data holders" would be better) and consumers.
and it's not all that fair to blame a directory for what its users do wrong. i do find kazaa's "corporate hacks" interesting. they've gone to great lengths to level the playing field on a corporate/legal level. i don't like their tech or their ethics in other areas but they have proved that there are ways for an underdog to fight large corporations.
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Even if they lose every single lawsuit, they can't be shut down. The US or Australia have no way of enforcing anything in Vanatu or Estonia. Besides, Kazaalite can continue to operate even if Sharman were nuked off the face of the earth. Hell, BearShare and other gnutella clients are even more decentralised than Kazaa. What they're doing is like trying to kill a fungus by killing the cell that started it. Going after the companies that make the software is useless, because people will continue to use and distribute the software long after the parent company is gone. Eventually, they'll realize that the ONLY way to stop piracy is to go after individuals and use scare tactics, so the RIAA/MPAA will go on a reign of terror arresting college students who share too many MP3s, movies, etc.
Repeal the DMCA!
When big music and big movies fail at thwarting P2P "at the top", they will, and this is a guarantee, start booting in doors and arresting/suing Joe Average for running Limewire and grabbing what appears to be a copyright movie or song.
Suing your customers is a somewhat questionable business model. I can't think of a single thing they could do that would kill them more quickly.
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The interesting part of all of this seems to be an underlying belief that every human endeavor must be industrialized. I personally don't pay for shrink-wrapped music, and I never will. I gladly pay musicians by means of a tip charge, cover charge to get into a club, and by buying an occasional CD from the band if they are good. Record companies get nothing from me.
Music isn't an industry, any more than art is. At the moment industry backed music chokes out the independents, leaving you with either corporate music, or having to search for independent music. I would listen to independents more, but I shouldn't have to work that hard to find music. Record labels gained power by getting access to OUR public airwaves and then monopolizing them, and attempts are being made to do the same with the Internet.
I was a musician and lived in Hollywood for a few years. The current system turns music into prostitution, where the only way a band can ever be heard is to prostitute themselves to the labels. The Internet has to potential to return music to its traditional place as folk art, and that is what the labels are out to stop.
Once people realize that music has been with us since the dawn of man, and doesn't need a corporate headquarters to exist and be good, then record companies will finally (and are) lose their grip.
Since giFT is still under heavy development, there are no "current" released files. The old releases that are available are basically not the same project, simply using the same name. After jasta "tookover" development, the project has significantly shifted in direction and has made no formal public releases since then. This is due to the extremely volatile nature of the project and we feel it would be best to withhold releases until some more APIs and protocol specifications mature and eventually freeze.
However, with that said, we still do provide the old giFT releases for educational purposes. Please note that the old giFT used to connect to FastTrack, but due to changes made on FastTrack's part, the client was kicked off the network and thus currently cannot connect. The modern giFT now utilizes an open source reintrepetation of FastTrack's ideas.
#3 pencils and quadrille pads.
Suing your customers is a somewhat questionable business model.
The idea is that they aren't your customers anymore than catching someone sneaking over the fence at the ballpark is prosecuting your "customer". Yeah some people strangely use P2P to grab copies of CDs that they own (a logic that is highly perplexing), but contrary to the "that's the majority" portrayal on Slashdot, overwhelmingly P2P is about people grabbing the latest hit song that they heard on the radio, or a divx of some movie (purportedly because they want a much lower quality version of the DVD they already own...)
Because Kazaa has 3.5 million users online at any given time. Gnucleus (Gnutella) only has ~150K.
And, Gnutella has a diversity of clients. Not all of them implement or support the latest advances. Meanwhile almot everyone on Kazaa runs the most recent version.
So, Kazaa is a better network, with more users. In other words, more content that is easier to find.
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
These ventures require money. Who will want to risk money on a venture that has a high likelyhood of getting smashed?
.50 to $1.50, and give the owner complete control over the file. Will that be enough to stop online music piracy? Of course not, but music piracy existed long before Napster came along.
90 million captive users watching your banner ads while they download? This is a golden business model of cat-and-mouse; by the time the courts shut them down, they will have made hundreds of millions, stashed away in private overseas accounts, and then they just declare bankruptcy to avoid paying anything out.
The reward is too great to discourage future Kazaa-wannabees, and all that is going to happen is that the rogue file swappers will perfect their business models based on all of the previous litigation and judgements. I suspect the RIAA will exhaust their legal war chest before they make a dent in online file swapping.
It just reinforces the fact that the music industry needs to offer a competitive product (not the token ones they are tossing us now). Start selling songs, from
> Kazaa is, AFAIK, a closed-source proprietary network. This network is presumably written and maintained by a small staff of dedicated programmers.
Unless the protocol is not broken, like it has been in the past (giFT 0.9.x). The main reason that the current protocol hasn't been broken yet is because 1). it's tough and time consuming to do, but not impossible 2). once it's done, the kazaa programmers could easily break it again, which they did in the past (KaZaA 1.3.3)
If the kazaa programmers were taken out of the picture, I'm pretty sure that groups like the "givers" who broke the protocol before, would do it again.
Suing your customers is a somewhat questionable business model.
The idea is that they aren't your customers anymore than catching someone sneaking over the fence at the ballpark is prosecuting your "customer".
That person still buys hotdogs (at incredably inflated prices!), beer (same), team merchandise, etc, etc, etc. So yes, they are a 'customer'.
overwhelmingly P2P is about people grabbing the latest hit song that they heard on the radio,
You mean they heard it FOR FREE on the radio?? And now they want to hear it for free again on their computer?
The idea is that they aren't your customers anymore than catching someone sneaking over the fence at the ballpark is prosecuting your "customer".
You're wrong.
The largest music-buying demographic is teenagers and college students, and they're also, as a whole, a group that frowns on "the establishment". In addition, even though they do buy a huge amount of music, in this demographic pretty much *everyone* downloads music, at least occasionally.
So, even if the RIAA only goes after the most hardcore P2Pers, the fact is that the group as a whole will see it as a personal attack by established corporate interests.
In short, the RIAA will seriously piss off a huge part of their customer base. It'll kill them.
As far as the ballpark analogy, consider that the ballparks just kick the kids out, they don't file trespassing charges against them. In the long run it's not even such a bad thing if the kids succeed in watching the occasional game -- just helps to ensure that they're going to be lifelong fans that will buy season tickets when they're adults and can afford it. In other words, the kids don't end up hating the baseball league, and that's important.
Yeah some people strangely use P2P to grab copies of CDs that they own (a logic that is highly perplexing)
Why is that perplexing? Personally, I'd rather rip and encode them myself (I like oggs with -q 6), but I can certainly see how it would be more convenient for some people to download them. I have helped my wife download copies of some music that she only has on vinyl (and can't buy on CD because it's never been published on CD). I have hooked my record player up to my computer, recorded the signal, post-processed it to clean it up and then compressed it, but it's a huge amount of work -- so I look to see if I can download it first. Also, I have downloaded copies of songs from to replace the ones I lost when my CDs got damaged.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Roughly 100% of those I know with broadband pirate stuff.
:p)? That'll be a $130.000+interest, thank you.
Roughly 0% of those I know with dial-up download stuff, they ask those above for a burned CD, but often they don't like asking for hand-outs.
Why? Speed. It's not about whether Napster / KaZaA / WinMX or whatever is easy to use or anything. As more and more people get/want broadband the faster it goes. What RIAA is doing is like playing Whack-A-Mole on a game machine that keeps going faster and faster.
Pretty soon, you can have so much stuff that if you're caught, you're bankrupt. 200gb of mp3s to $2/song (about full retail price here
I'm pretty sure you can manage to do so already with books. Oh that's 200gb of e-books, only 1 kazillion dollars for you.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I see this over and over and over again, that CD's are too expensive. So a CD costs a dollar to make, big deal. There are thousands of other products that have low manufacturing costs with extremely high markup to cover product marketing and development, do you complain about all of them? Now I do think the recording industry is fighting the tide here, and that they need some fundamental changes. I'm not going to go off on the whole "function of the label" rant you've likely seen before, but there is a basic reason that CD's cost what they do and its from your first economics class:
So lets say the overall cost of a CD including manufacturing, royalties, all the various channel costs, and promotion is about $5. CDs are now about $15, and I buy about 4 a month, with revenue of $60 and profit of $40. If CDs were $30, I'd probably buy one, revenue is $30, profit is $25, not a good move on the part of the label. Now, if CDs were $7, I'd probably buy a couple extra, but not alot extra because I just don't have time to listen to that many new ones and quite frankly, there are probably not enough good ones to satisfy that level of purchase. Now that the revenue is at $42 and the profit is at $12, someone at the label is going to get fired. Oh, and if it cost $7, you would either a) still say its too expensive or b) find a new reason to justify pirating, so they get nothing from you either way.
Also, if charging $15 is so evil, how come every band I see selling CDs at their shows charges $10-15? Do you yell at them for "exorbitant" markup?
This is not the greatest sig in the world, this is just a tribute.
And this is good, how? Leechers *do* suck. What's the loss to just leave Kazaa up when you're not using it. Hell, I have a dial-up connection, and I just leave my copy of Kazaa up whenever I'm not using the machine. So, fuck you and your cheating program.
"but I would rather support a network that doesn't foist spyware "
So basically your saying your giving the moral highground to a service that is "better" for committing priacy and copyright infringement as opposed to one that fosters spyware?
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
The world media corporations are scared to death of the Internet and how file sharing is quickly decreasing their revenue. At some point they are going to realize that the Internet, as we know it today, is their main enemy (rather than just file sharing applications). Don't you think they will try really hard to lobby for killing the Internet? I know, I know, they can and they do sell content on-line, but the threat is too great, and they may push really hard to create a new network with such draconian control that no piracy will take place. Do you think this is a real threat? Will they succeed? As a first step, they could simply buy a few of the major ISPs (most are bankrupt) and impose content filtering. They certainly have enough money to fight this war...
So, even if the RIAA only goes after the most hardcore P2Pers, the fact is that the group as a whole will see it as a personal attack by established corporate interests.
In short, the RIAA will seriously piss off a huge part of their customer base. It'll kill them.
I doubt it.
They'll whine and gnash their teeth and buy the CDs anyways. This is the same demographic that says "music group X has sold out!" and buys all of their stuff anyways, and who will watch TV for hours on end while complaining that there's nothing good on.
As for prosecution, the only people hit will be the suppliers with gigabytes of music or hundreds of movies. Most people won't be directly under attack, and so will barely notice. Remember pirate boards in BBS days? The boards, not the users, were the ones hit. It was actually even more selective than that; the boards specializing in credit card fraud and kiddie porn were hit, while the smaller fish were ignored. This is a natural consequence of the prosecuting organization's resources being limited. Joe User didn't really care; there were always more boards.
What happens for Joe User is that their favourite boards go down, it becomes harder for them to find what they want online, so they pester their parents to buy $item instead of spending hours looking for it.
Sharing can't be eliminated, but it can be made inconvenient, which is good enough. And people will still buy things no matter what.
Furthermore, many people (including myself) have cable modems. Upload speeds are "capped" at a fraction of the download speeds. I can DOWNLOAD from KaZaA with relative ease, and still manage to browse webpages, or use a secure shell connection to a remote site, or do anything else I normally do (except play games which require an extremely low latency).
However, introduce just one upload from my computer, and I suddenly find that my HTTP requests take forever to get to webservers, and even Google's front page takes longer to load.
Even so - I tend to allow uploads to continue. What I keep in my "shared" directory are mostly those hard-to-find files that take forever to download because there are a lack of people with that file. I can only hope that people who get those files from me are doing the same.
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Disclaimer: The above statement probably includes half-truths, because real truth is too complicated.
I mean really, you hardly have anything to complain about here, using a quasi-illegal program to share music you shouldn't, by law, be sharing in the first place. Please feel free to drop the hypocritical facade any time your ready. So while you engage in semi-illegal file transfers, people are leeching files from you in a similar manner. I call that "Irony".
Move along, nothing to see here.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
One does wonder why Usenet is yet to be sued. It far predates Napster. Does it in some way pass a legal challenge that Napster didn't, or is it considered just too arcane for Joe College-Student to use in ripping off the starving record companies?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Did these dumbfucks ever consider that CD sales are down because:
A. most of the new music coming out SUCKS
B. the economy is WAY in the tank, millions of people are either out of work or lost billions of dollars in the dot-com fallout, and would rather buy food than CD's.
C. CD's are so fucking over-priced it's hilarious.
If everyone (or a significant majority of everyone) set their participation level to "Supreme Being", it would just invalidate the whole "participation level" system and we'd be back where we were before it was added--from each according to his upstream, to each according to his downstream. IMO that would be a good thing. It's hard enough finding the right version of the song I'm looking for, not a bad cover or low-bitrate or RIAA-spoofed version. We don't need this artificial user rating system on top of it.
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
You are exactly right, it doesn't really matter what the profit _margin_ is* which is why I wasn't talking about the margin. Its the bottom line. Do I care about their costs? No. I don't ask the car manufacturer how much its paying for rubber or steel, do you? If the price is agreeable to me, then I buy it. When I first started buying CDs back in 1987 or so, they cost about $18-20. Now, 15 years later, I'm paying about $15 ($11.88 for most new releases at Newbury Comics). Sounds to me like they are getting cheaper.
Also, can some explain the logic in "Labels screw artists by giving them a small share, so I will pirate the music and make sure the artist gets zero"? If you mail the artist a few bucks for every album you grab off the net, my pardons, but I doubt that is commonplace.
* I'm sure it matters but not as much as total profit
This is not the greatest sig in the world, this is just a tribute.
Let's not go throwing around insults without understanding what they mean.
"...committing priacy and copyright..."
Both of these are violations of the law, but so what? Law is not the same as Right, and in fact, it has often been the opposite. It's possible to argue that music sharing amounts to civil disobedience, which all political theorists (who are not currently in power) will tell you is a Good Thing. Let's remember that a Good Thing is what's best for people in general, not what's best for the coorporations.
Here's how to make that argument:
Obviously, the system won't work if everyone gets their music for free. The recording companies won't make any profit, and people in general won't hear well-recorded music at all. This, however, does not by itself justify the bullshit that recording companies are putting us through. It is entirely possible for most people to get their music for free, and a few to pay for it.
People like CDs. They like the package, the booklet, the pictures. So, it's likely that of the people who download lots of free music, those of them who can afford to will buy the CDs they particularly like. Since about $17 of every $20 CD is pure profit for the record company, they really don't have to sell to a very high percentage of their audience. Some people say that this is the reason why record sales were at a peak before Napster died, and have dropped off since. I, personally, bought 5 of the 7 RIAA CDs I own because I heard the music first for free, illegally.
That would lead us to believe that we'd all be better off with filesharing/ piracy, even the giant rich companies everyone hates. Besides, making it illegal is like prohibition - now the only people who purvey shared files are themselves criminals, and can't be trusted. We all know what Kazaa tries to do to our computers.
<rant>
Another (moderatly less convincing) way to make this argument is to say that those &^%*& record companies shouldn't charge so much. Maybe if they charged a reasonable amount, like $7, for each CD, more peopel would buy. The reason this is less likely to convince is that free market capitalists will argue that the all-knowing public in this, our idealized capitalistic economy, would have counteracted any selfish moves of the businesses and prices will have already reached their equillibrium. The fact is that this just isn't true; the music industry, just like most others in America, is an oligopily, which functions just like a monopoly except that it avoids the letter of the law against monopolies.
</rant>
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
Once you label all these diverse people as "criminals" or "thieves", or even imply that they are (people in the crossfire for example)they will ALL revolt.
No they won't - people mostly don't give a damn, and almost never get together about anything.
therefore the costs are past on to your grandma out in montana on dialup who googles only for cross stich patterns.
She can try this one:
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
In Finland most records cost over 20 euros.