Kazaa Says On Track to Be Most-Downloaded Program

Cody Watkins writes "Reuters has a story about Kazaa surpassing ICQ as the most downloaded piece of software (according to C|Net Download.com). 'As of late Thursday, the Kazaa Media Desktop application -- a file-sharing software that has drawn the wrath of the music industry by enabling its users to swap songs for free -- had been downloaded 229,150,955 times, as measured by Download.com.'"

Comments

eh?

[djupedal]

I thought that record belonged to Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson...

In related news...

[DeadScreenSky]

Cydoor and BDE could soon announce that they are still beating Kazaa for the title of "Most-Downloaded Program", since they are also installed with many non-Kazaa programs as well.

(Memory a little hazy here! Fact nazis, prepare your guns!)
Kind of like how Doom was the most downloaded program ever durings its era...except for the unzip program that they distributed with the installer.

Anyways: Over 200 million spyware installations just from one program. That is a pretty scary thought, isn't it?

Re:Napster baaad, Kazaa wooorse

[tedDancin]

That's a good point. I think the only thing that (possibly) saves the big software companies is the following thought process:

1. Hmm.. I'm going to use Kazaa to download Photoshop.
2. Enters search terms.
3. ???
4. [Downloads pr0n]

Re:Only the highest on download.com

[sould]

Over 335 million unique RealPlayer/RealOne Player registrations have been received by RealNetworks.

At least 300 million of them were me doing sould1@foo.bar, sould2@foo.bar, sould3@foo.bar, .... sould300000000@foo.bar 'cause I couldn't remember what I'd registered as last time I'd needed to watch a realplayer movie, before deleting the binaries 'cause it's a buggy, reminderware, bloated heap o' shite!

Kazaa Lite?

[tankdilla]

They should also check with the folks at Kazaa Lite, the Kazaa version without all those ads. Including this version they've probably already passed ICQ. Unless of course they already accounted for the lite version.

Punishment

[malia8888]

IMHO the poor souls who download Kazaa will find they may have brought something upon themselves they didn't expect. A few of our computer repair customers have shared files using this medium and their machine performance has gone to pure garbage. Kazaa lite is supposed to not have spyware--a hack of the original--per a google search. Kazaa claims they don't salt in spyware; however, our experience refutes that.

Further, it is rumored that viruses or worms can be transmitted via sound files on Kazaa. I can't prove this in my humble capacity as a repairman. However, I would feel subjecting my computer to their site would be like sending the poor machine to a cyber orgy without condoms

Re:Beat Gator huh?

[Billly Gates]

" If one really wanted to be a jerk, you could send out HTML spam containing some JavaScript code and take the title in a coupla weeks"

In other news kazaalite was beaten by the following program titled "Good evening, as you all know the royal family of Nigera is considered one of the wealthiest......."

In related news...

[arvindn]

In related news, an RIAA spokesperson has announced that they will be filing suit against Sharman Networks Ltd. for contributory infringement over the Kazaa filesharing program. The damages are being calculated based on RIAA's estimates that each user downloaded 1000 songs using the Kazaa network, valued at $150,000 per song, and download.com's figures of 229,150,955 downloads for the program. The spokesperson refused to comment on the total damages sought, but Detroit Free Press columnist Heather Newman has estimated the amount to $34,350,000,000,000,000, or 34 million billion dollars, which, she assures us, is enough to buy all the music CDs every produced in the galaxy since the big bang several thousand times over.

RIAA senior vice president for business and legal affairs Matthew Oppenheim has said: "Stealing is stealing. Piracy contributes to terrorism and eats away from the profits of the music industry, driving up costs for everyone." Industry analysts worry that in the future, software makers will not be the sole target of the behemoth's notoriously aggressive copyright defenses. Some have speculated that vendors of popular operating systems on which these software run may be next, and that hardware manufacturers may not be far behind. One of our anonymous correspondents wondered: "what happens if they decide to outlaw the internet?"

What about windows ?

[theefer]

I'd have thought windows would be the most downloaded program (in order to make Kazaa work for instance) ...

Re:Sampling

[spectral]

They may not do much advertising for themselves, but holy shit, they certainly DO do a lot of advertising.

The truth...

[root 66]

That's only because people have to redownload it as they keep trashing their windows systems with Kazaa and all the spyware and malware it brings despite all the junk that people will actually download.

Happy fortnighty format C: everyone.

p.s.: Ad-Aware helps, too.

You forgot free

[birdman666]

The article and the claim state that Kazaa is on track to become the most downloaded free software ever, not the most downloaded piece of software ever. I think Microsoft bug fixes have that base covered.