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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."
Kazaa is P2P for the non-power users...I urge everyone to try out eMule / eDonkey....file integrity is next to none other and speed is remarkably impressive (considering the chunk based downloading system). Check it out!
It's hard to condemn someone and still profit from their popularity.
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).
How dare you! I plan to RETIRE to Vanuatu! With a land area slightly larger than Conneticut, a total population less than 200,000 people, and an economy based mostly on subsistence farming and, er, shady overseas financial deals (with a little tourism on the side,) what's not to love?
o s/ nh.html
Please note the above comments about shady financial dealings, and ask yourself again why Kazaa is incorporated there.
For more information on vanuatu, see the CIA world Factbook.
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ge
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
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
I got curious, so I checked it out. It's a small island nation in the South Pacific. Here's a map, for the interested:
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
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?
Diet Kazaa is much better than kazaalite you can change your nearest supernode[find a t1 or higher super node]. It has ip browser that show the ip address of the remote user. It blocks upgrade notice. You can customize ur kazaa remove the media bar, remove the menu bar etc.. all that kazaalite lacks
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quote:port 17 udp
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.
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#3 pencils and quadrille pads.
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!
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
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.
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.
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 don't care about being a power user or not. I want to be on as diverse a P2P network as possible, to have the best chance of find relatively obscure work. Being able to use a back-propagating learning neural network that reassembles fragmented downloads intelligently and learns bad host IDs is useless to me if I am on a P2P network limited to Rush fans.
I call on all thieves to email their ill gotten gains back to the MPAA. I have about 300GB that I should send back to them and if the rest of you criminals did the same we could solve this scourge on society once and fer-all.
Because of the intense bandwidth being consumed at universities across the nation for uploads and downloads thru the Kazaa ports, many schools are cracking down on fileswappers (not for copyright, but to keep the network traffic managable). In that way, a lot of college students will leech because if they spike the upload bandwidth, the IT police knock on their door and terminate their in-room connection. This has been covered here at slashdot before.
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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.