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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."
I've moved on... Kazaa is old hat, the media and big coporations are after it. DC++ is growing and if you can find decent hubs they are much better than Kazaa. I happen to be on one hub which requires 100gig verified share and 10mbit of bandwidth...
*grin*
You do realize that if all everyone did was leech then the entire system would collapse right??
I like the way that Overnet does things. Your max download speed is 4X your upload speed. This forces people to use their upstream bandwidth, even if they're not sharing anything (which is evil in itself) as the temp files are all also shared (so anything you're downloading can be downloaded by other people until it's completed).
From the article:
Record labels and movie studios want the services closed and fined $150,000 for each illegally traded song or movie.
The dollar figure itself is ridiculous, but I find it interesting that the proposed fine is the same for movies and songs. Let's say the average song is 3 minutes, and the average movie is 90 minutes - i.e. 30 times the length of a song. If the movie fine were $150,000, then the fine for a song should be $5,000 (using duration as the primary factor). If the fine for a song were $150,000, well...
Having said that, I don't believe the labels, et al will collect anything.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
These ventures require money. Who will want to risk money on a venture that has a high likelyhood of getting smashed?
Whack-a-mole Napster, Whack-a-mole Kazaa.
Who's next?
The other Ace in the hole that the RIAA has is going after users. Wait till they sue 500 or so of the most pernicious "sharers" at your local university. Would you step in to replace them?
Um... Even from the article it doesn't look like kazaa will be "going down" any time soon. Sherma nset it up so that it would be pretty much impossible to take apart, wheather or not he was still involved with it. I really don't think the media industry has any idea what they are dealing with. They seem to think that now that they have him it will end. They can do eveything they want to him include kill him and kazaa will live on. They really have nothing but the man who started it. Kudoos to him tho ;)
Creedence Clearwater Revival is the best example of this. They were foolish enough to heed the advice of a label accountant and agreed to shelter their royalties into an offshore corporation under the control of the label - and then stood helpless as they discovered to their horror that the corporation and their money vanished.
And of course the labels continue to refuse to open the accounting books for audits. These practices continue today, through contracts that severely restrict audit policies and reducing the royalty flow to artists to a trickle leaving them with no resources to hire the qualified legal counsel necessary to force the labels to open their books. If you thought Enron or WorldCom were bad...
I find it highly ironic and appropriate that the RIAA is chasing a target who is beating them by using their own tactics through offshore puppet corporations with ghost staff and through countries that do not acknowledge US law. In the end when the RIAA is pointing a finger at KaZaa in court, it should be emphasized that they have three fingers pointing back to them.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Thats extremely unlikely to happen.
Actually enforcing such a scheme, even just for US netizens, would be a very difficult task.
Not only that, but Im fairly sure that tracking people (and consequently collecting information about them) would be an illegal act in itself.
No, the only way to combat music-sharing is to fight on the same turf. Setup a secure server; allow people to download tracks for a small(er) fee. Offer additional features, competitions, chances to win things etc. Give them a reason to pay for the music online, and maybe they will...
Just my $0.02...
http://www.reeb.freeserve.co.uk
Is anyone using HTTPS yet? That would be tough to block, because they'd be interfering with inter-state commerce, and if I recall correctly, that would run smack into the Constitution...
As for getting filters implemented in every country, that'll pretty soon take care of itself. When every PC in the US has the "Trusted Platform" chip built in, the Internet will fragment into two parts - the USA and Everyone Else. This will be due to the Trusted Platform equipment in the USA not letting itself talk to the non-Trusted Platform equipment in the European Union and elsewhere.
Why don't they use an opensource protocol such as OpenFT?
They could only supply a windows gui and throw the ads and spyware on the users. They wouldn't be the driving force behind the protocol so the Music-Industry couldn't sue them for providing a filesharing platform. Am i wrong on this?
cu,
Lispy
It's pretty hard to find very new releases and really old/rare releases on directconnect. And the problem with fake sharing is hurting it more and more, especially with clients like dctc/dc_gui where you can type how much you want to virtually share in GB :p
Seriously... I have no respect left of KaZaA or the Music Industry.
KaZaA would do anything to make money. The founders will move to strange countries with strange names. The will look into selling "my" hard-drive space and to physically take control of my computer and display ads that they feel are appropriate. I won't use KaZaA.
The Music Industry would have me buy a cd that may or may not work everywhere that I would want to play it. Simply because they are so insecure about their product and the willingness of people to steal it. I have bought 3 cds in the past year and that was plenty for me to decide that I will never buy a cd again. Empower the user with your product... Don't reduce them down to nothing.
that strange country could be nuked tomorrow and I wouldn't mourn the loss of KaZaA. Good friends, newsgroups, and IRC are 10x better than KaZaA... and I don't even have to look at Ads.
Qutoed from the article:
> Estonia, a notorious safe harbor for intellectual property pirates.
That's a bunch of nonsense. The BSA (business software alliance) has a gestapo mentality in this land. They come with the police, they ride your place and they confiscate everything. And they put you into newspaper. There's even a special anonymous phone - call them, tell who to search - and that gives them enough power to go in with a police warrant.
They spread leaflets - "are you a thief, we're soong coming to check you". They have TV ads, fear spam-campaings, etc.
The primary problem with kazaa is that the US courts don't really have jurisdiction here. There isn't much they can do. They tried to get documents using our courts but their request was inconsistent according to the local judges.
I have to agree with Zemran here. I think that the main reason why CD sales have decreased is that THEY ARE TOO EXPENSIVE. With the somewhat recent competition coming from DVDs and Video Games, the music industry MUST show that their products are worth the exorbitant sticker prices charged. It costs less than a dollar for a person to make a CD that ordinarily costs 14 to 19 dollars at a store. Prices are GROSSLY inflated. The RIAA can continue to attack these filesharing services, but they MUST find a way to either lower the price of CDs, add enough value to CDs to merit their price, or do both. If they don't, I expect the record industry to be supplanted by a more consumer-friendly method of distribution. ADAPT OR PERISH.
Gnucleus is not a bad utility, but it lacks a sufficient userbase to be of use to me. I recently switched to KazaaLite after using Gnucleus for what was probably a good 8 months, and files that I searched for that whole time on Gnucleus no one ever had...but I found them immediately with various users on KazaaLite.
With filesharing, you have to go where everyone else is to have any hope of finding anything specific that you're looking for. Sure, roaming someone else's shared files for something new can be fun, but it's time-consuming and often fruitless.
I used to agree with all the arguments you made about why Gnucleus is worthwhile, but I finally broke down and said: "Damnit, I just want to find what I'm looking for." And having Gnucleus spend 10 minutes trying to connect to SuperNode every time just so I can get zero results for a search doesn't impress me too much.
"The US or Australia have no way of enforcing anything in Vanatu or Estonia."
You forget the sacred and hallowed rights given by holding mastery at force of arms.
To put it bluntly, I'll quote one Paul Muad'dib. "He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing."
The last time I checked, the United States alone had enough firepower to destroy several small islands in the pacific.
Once all non-cooperative governments are brought into line, it's a simple matter to pass legislation outlawing the use of filesharing programs such as Kazaa.
The next step is questionable. Do you line the users up and have them shot? While it would save taxpayer money, it's about the only tax savings that wouldn't increase popularity. Thus, given the widespread use of Kazaa/etc., one would be forced to build more prisons/etc. These would cost taxpayers money, of course, but perhaps enough spin could be put on the fact that they would create a multitude of new jobs (including construction, security and secretarial).
Assuming no major problems with budget ("Just make up some more money and take out more loans!") and no revolutions (I don't expect people will be giving their lives for the right to steal movies), the 'reign of terror' will come to pass, and filesharing will be, in effect, shut down.
Boom.
What is FreeNet?
Supposedly, being on the FreeNet provides total anonymity because the protocols are encrypted from the ground up. You can't know where stuff is coming from and where stuff is going. This prevents spying, even by rogue clients. The content on FreeNet is hosted by every computer that is connected to the FreeNet at the time. You have a data store on your computer when you are connected to the FreeNet, but it is encrypted so you can't know what content from the FreeNet is being hosted on your computer (which brings up other issues). Of course nobody else can supposedly tell either.Freenet is a large-scale peer-to-peer network which pools the power of member computers around the world to create a massive virtual information store open to anyone to freely publish or view information of all kinds. Freenet is:
* Highly survivable: All internal processes are completely anonymized and decentralized across the global network, making it virtually impossible for an attacker to destroy information or take control of the system.
* Private: Freenet makes it extremely difficult for anyone to spy on the information that you are viewing, publishing, or storing.
* Secure: Information stored in Freenet is protected by strong cryptography against malicious tampering or counterfeiting.
I don't know the implications, or even if it is a feasible task to port P2P to FreeNet, but I think something like this is a necessary step as time marches on and as the red tape and legal woes thicken. (Maybe the implicit anonymous nature of the FreeNet doesn't allow for the same P2P processes to work -- then again maybe it's ideal) .Right now FreeNet is very slow and the last time I used it (version 0.4) was buggy. However I haven't tried the latest 0.5 release.
Of course this won't necessarily prevent the companies that create and distrubute the P2P software from being prosectued. However it might provide the anonymity that these companies need to distribute their software and keep operating -- provided they don't make themselves known to the public. If they are not known, then nobody can find them. Which begs the question: Then how would these companies get advertising revenue if nobody knows about them? Well, they could advertise on a webpage on the FreeNet and accept credit card payments over the FreeNet, and then the advertiser's content would magically appear in the P2P application. This would take a lot of trust on behalf of the advertisers.
Just a thought. I'd like to hear a response from developers who are involved with the FreeNet project and/or P2P clients about the feasibility of all this.
I had an interesting thought the other day. Hang with me for a moment...
If I hear a song on the radio, and I record it. That is okay. If I record something off the TV antenna, that is also ok.
Now consider companies like Clear Channel, whose only goal is to cover every square inch of the US's surface area with the same radio stations. Theoretically, 88.9 in Podunk, USA, is the same as 88.9 in San Francisco, Tacoma, Buffalo, etc. Now, I'm wandering around, going to work, etc. being bombarded with these radio stations, and these television broadcasts, so, if I were recording everything broadcast to me, I'd probably have copies of all the latest music and some popular television programs. Now suppose, through corporate machinery, prettymuch the same opportunity were available to each and every American Citizen. What copyright gripe could the media companies have?
I realize the nature of copyright is such that I cannot redistribute works that are copyrighted. I can't find it on findlaw, but it seems like someone was caught selling stuff that had been broadcast (the superbowl, I think) that he had recorded. If memory serves, the ruling was something like new audiences were being created for the copyrighted work, audiences the original copyright holder was entitled to. But what if at every corner of the US you can pick up Clear Channel?
Better yet--what if I start a TiVo type service. We make you sign lots of paper work and we verify where you live. We have a computer program and a schedule of all content on broadcasts you can receive. Our computer records it, and lets you download it from our website. I'd expect the FBI to haul me away and lock up the key--but I don't think it is (or should be) illegal. What exactly has happened here? The people we're serving have a right to the content, we've just automated the time-shift of when that content is delivered to them. We'll even include the commercials, though for single songs people might want, this won't work as a lot of radio stations have moved their commercials to about once per hour or once per half-hour.
As far as quality goes, I wonder if Sattelite radio is obscured behind some sort of "terms of service" agreement that you agree to listen in exchange for not recording at all.
Quote:
For the entire article, try this
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
i've been on linux using gtk-gnutella for awhile now, so i haven't really kept up with kazaa. but what you've just pointed out to me is very interesting, and i think threatens users.
kazaa makes money via file-sharing. users don't. however, by getting these "i am not a leech!" points, users are offering their services in exchanging for kazaa's services. this makes users subject to litigation that isn't just the usual riaa bullcrap, because they can argue that what the users are doing is commercial exchange. users' uploading services pay for kazaa's downloading services; kazaa's downloading services pay for the users' uploading services.
IANAL, but as i understand things, this gives validity to suing individual users (of kazaa).
"The US or Australia have no way of enforcing anything in Vanatu or Estonia."
In the case of Estonia, they may have some incentives. Incentives like "If you'd like a free trade agreement.." or "If you'd like to join NATO..."
Ah, you took the five steps ahead approch to this. I do not doubt that your doomsday end-result isn't likely to happen, on the contrary, it will happen--it's just a matter of time.
However, this thing we call piracy is nothing new. Closed circle casual piracy, like casual sex will always be around, however now we see a change that's been brewing since Napster came to power, we're now seeing MASS piracy, MASS amounts of people engaging in IP violations. This says something about the media conglomos themselves, this says something about how the consumer trend is changing, and this says something about IP/copyright laws in general.
The sides are polarizing, and what used to be a decent civilization of consumers and content creators has now de-evolved into a new "Wild West".
Let them come, Let the RIAA/MPAA start suing consumers who utilize p2p in their spare time. I don't think you fully understand what kind of shit storm that would rain down on the entertainment industry once this starts. Why do you think they've been trying to shutdown the sites instead of suing the users?? Not because they love us, but because of massively BAD PR. There are MILLIONS, and MILLIONS of p2p file swappers....Some old, some young, some with good paying jobs, some without.
Some with a grudge against the "man" and some who just want to actually get to know what they are buying before they buy it. And there are others in between.
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.
And that's not all, there are people in the crossfire here that have nothing to do with p2p that will get hurt too. CD-R taxation, ISP being taxed and therefore the costs are past on to your grandma out in montana on dialup who googles only for cross stich patterns. And when they look at what's going on, they'll blame the person who's behind the jacking of the connection costs--The ISP, and once the ISP gets enough heat on them, then they bitch back at the RIAA/MPAA...then after the news media gets wind of all of this...MORE people try out p2p, and more people see how obnoxious the tactics of the MPAA/RIAA are, and the cycle continues to escalate.
The "general populace" you speak of *is* engaged in this activity.
Far too many people spend time on their polar sides to understand what is going on here. The RIAA is taking fair use away, the MPAA extending copyrights every time they're about to expire, price fixing of CDs, obnoxious bands on payola radio, overly restrictive DRM on CDs, the list goes on and on, but that's just to name a few.
Something has to give or this will fester at a exponetial rate. People will be hunted down and fined/jailed, the RIAA will be bleeding red ink, their will still be fabucated crap on the radio. There will be rallies in the streets and online, mass dissent among consumers, and most of all, new laws that will bring new restrictions on things that we thought were safe.
Look at it this way, the whole p2p idea sprung up out of practically no where, and jetted into the internet's mainstream practically overnight. Yet, the RIAA has been working the same business model for multiple decades. If you don't move fast enough and change enough, your consumers will either fuck you, or leave you. And p2p users who are and who used to be media consumers are doing them both. That tells me that something is wrong on the content holder's side. But that isn't to say they should heed to the "pirate's" wishes, all i'm saying is both sides have better start looking for compromises before it becomes to late.
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
i hardly consider cable to be horribly capped. i use cable and whenever my participation points reach to low, i just stop dling and let others load off of my files. i usually have around 800 points and i dont leech. i share everything and i wish others would do the same. as for leechers, go to hell! people, share your files, damn it! SHARE!!!! that is all
YOU SUCK BALLS!
The technology behind FreeNet is very cool, very well thought out, except for one thing: searching. You can't really search for arbitrary strings like most apps. They are working on it, but a good solution is yet to come out of it.
There are some indexing services, but they need to grow and get a user community behind them (like FileNexus and ShareReactor for eDonkey/Overnet)
If they got that going, it'd be interesting... but then you would still be restricted to searching in what was in the releases index... which would not reflect everything that is available.
Cheers
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
To satisfy my curiosity, I followed your advice and tried eMule.
thus far, I'd consider it poorer-than-average.
On Kazaa I routinely get downloads of 50k/s and even if I'm not, at least my upstream is being used somewhat efficiently. On Emule my upstream is barely being used (I'm sharing 44 Gigs of files, and have almost 400 uploads queued, and for some reason it's barely doing 1.5k/s?) and in 3 hours I've gotten 1 Meg of a Gig's worth of queued files with over 80 sources altogether.
Kazaa does better than this. although I love the chunked network system idea, it doesn't seem to be 'working'.
If you're hearing rhetoric about Linux, open source, or Mac and everyone's bashing Microsoft, you've found Slashdot.
That's due to a technical quirk of TCP/IP that is more prevailent with asymetric links.
Every received TCP packet must be acknowledged with an ACK packet. If you allow something to use 100% of your upload bandwidth, you'll find your ACK packets from your downloads get queued to get sent back in the upstream. This hammers your internet connection because the servers won't send you any more packets until you have ACK'ed the already sent ones.
The solution is to limit uploads to around 90 - 95 % of your total upload capacity. Unfortunatly, while Kazaa has an in-build bandwidth throttle that you can set, you can only change it in powers of two. I prefer WinMX, which allows you to set any value you want.
This web page explains the problem and the solution in better detail than I have, with graphs etc.
If you are using a Linux NAT box or a good firewall, you may be able to set up traffic shaping to not allow p2p to max things out. This will also give priority to the ACK packets, and you can set it so that HTTP traffic also gets priority. It's pretty complex stuff though.