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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.
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.
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
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.
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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.
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...
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.
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