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Shutting down Kazaa

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the tough-to-do dept.

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."

5 of 500 comments (clear)

  1. Leechers Suck! by Seek_1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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).

  2. Fighting the RIAA using their own tactics by AnalogDiehard · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Record labels have used offshore corporations and tax havens to siphon profits from struggling artists for years, telling them that their income would be safe from US or UK tax laws. Then that money mysteriously disappears.

    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
  3. Re:Hehe, let em try. by surprise_audit · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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

    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.

  4. KaZaa vs. RIAA by Ab0rtRetryFail · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. P2P Needs a More Secure Base (e.g. FreeNetProject) by jdkane · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Given the cases of late where big-name companies are sniffing out and trying to also legally charge P2P "offenders", I would like to see increased security, not in the form of SSL/encryption -- because that won't help when IP numbers are still available -- but instead I would like to see an implementation of P2P clients that run on top of the FreeNet project, or something similar. http://freenetproject.org Here's a brief description from the FreeNet project website to provide some context:

    What is FreeNet?
    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.

    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.

    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.