Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Kazaa/Altnet To Pay Users For Trading Content

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the not-as-good-as-it-sounds dept.

mesozoic writes "News.com is reporting that Kazaa and Altnet are unrolling a setup where users are paid to distribute 'authorized content.' The article also mentions something about getting rid of unauthorized files, but is unclear on when and how. I'll be paying close attention to whether this P2P business model pans out; Sharman _has_ shown some shrewd business sense in the past."

3 of 225 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Raises some interesting issues by UnknowingFool · · Score: 4, Informative
    According to copy right laws in the US, works are copy-righted for the life of the author plus 70 years. It used to be 50 years. So Elvis' work will still be the property of his estate (or the record company depending on who actually owns what) until 2047.

    With the Internet, things are less clear because the expanse and reach of it have only recently been addressed in the courts. Presumably, someone in the USA downloading your copy would be breaking copyright laws whereas someone is Germany would not. That is the present situation until the courts or governments decide otherwise.

    --
    Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
  2. More crappy patents by Sanity · · Score: 5, Informative
    The company is looking to a new patent license for one new revenue source. It has acquired rights to a 1999 patent that Bermeister says covers the technique of identifying files on peer-to-peer networks using a "hash," or digital fingerprint based on the contents of the file. The company will approach virtually all other peer-to-peer services to seek license rights, Bermeister said.
    Good luck to them - the actual 1999 patent is invalidated by the hashtable datastructure which has been around for decades, and their 2002 patent is clearly nullified by the Content Hash Key first introduced in Freenet in 2001 (and I am sure earlier prior art exists too but Freenet, being a P2P network, is more on-point).
  3. Kazaa Lite - Tastes Great::Less Filling by FrEaK7782 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just use KazaaLite. And then run Ad-Aware to remove Gator and all the other evil spyware and crap Kazaa installs. Plus, KazaaLite makes you a super user. Supposedly that has benefits...