Slashdot Mirror
KaZaA Wants to Be An Official Content Distributor
scubacuda writes "Detroit News: Nikki Hemming, CEO of KaZaA, says KaZaA wants to be the official online distributor for the entertainment industry. 'Realize that this technology is inexorable, and come to the table,' says Hemming to our friends Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti."
Kazaa has basically made it's reputation spitting in the face of media companies. Their attitude to the RIAA and the US Government has been one of defiance, and frankly, arrogance from the very start.
Record labels will build their own online distribution points. Most of them are quite committed to the day Kazaa ceases to exist. If THIS was the strategy of Sharman Networks from the beginning, it was ill-concieved at best, and idiotic at worst. You don't piss in the face of competitors, laugh at them for it, and then expect them to actually WORK with you.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
At some point you've got to sell your soul
Distrubuting Spyware is not selling your soul?
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
'Realize that this technology is inexorable, and come to the table,' says Hemming to our friends Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti."
Continuation of blurb above... "'Realize that this technology is inexorable, and come to the table. Just make sure your pants are at your ankles when you are bent over the table signing the deal because either way you are taking it in the ass, at least when you get *pumped* by me you get a little money"
I predict that if this happens, the FastTrack protocol will be modified and used within a 'Kazaa-lite 2' P2P network (I can see some areas where it can use improvement, too).
The Kazaa people might have a monoply on Kazaa now... but it won't last if they do this (because obviously they're going to have to add some sort of DRM or other limits to the P2P network so that it's profitable).
not of the end user. They have been actively trying to get their software onto machines without the users' knowledge.
And, do they not realise the Hillary Rosen stepped down from the RIAA? Keep up.
Personally, I wouldn't touch anything that has the word "Kazaa" in it with a ten foot pole. Best to stay far away from that advertisement & spyware-ridden beast. Advertisements I can deal with. Spyware on the other hand is intolerable.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
I disagree. Entering into a partnership with Kazaa could only benefit the RIAA. They will have an in-place, widespread distribution network (though the number of subscribers will drop precipitously) and it will remove Kazaa from the list of p2p network software that facilitates piracy. The RIAA won't have to deal with any more legislation with Kazaa. The RIAA doesn't want control over their content, they want the money that piracy denies them - which is what this deal would give them.
But Kazaa Lite uses the same network as the real Kazaa, so any major changes to the system would effect both applications.
You make some excellent points here. I agree that given the resources and time, KaZaA can be crushed. However, the only issue with crushing KaZaA is the users. We as internet users ( yes; like parent, I also have illegally downloaded music/programs/movies from my peers, so sue me ) are far too used to getting these things for free; that we take its legality for granted.
If you ask the average person on the street who uses a computer if they download music and such from KaZaA, chances are, they will say yes. It is also likely that they either don't realize that it's illegal or don't care, as the mentality of "they'll never catch me" applies to most internet users.
If KaZaA is destroyed, some other service will take reign of the illegal file sharing business. It's going to be nearly impossible to stop the everything-is-free mentality of p2p users.
Added to this, many users of KaZaA and the like are minors who do not have credit cards or any other means to support a pay-per-download mechanism. Unfortunately, because these users are so young, they do not have the moral upbringing to realize that copyright violation is stealing.
Okay, I'll stop typing now.
I could see BitTorrent being embraced by the media companies, simply because it is less associated at its core with infringing on IP and such. The media companies have had huge legal battles with Kazaa; why would they possibly want to have anything to do with them besides trying to shut them down?
Nah, most supernodes are basically cable modems. The network itself is costing nothing (except to the individal people who pay for their own bandwidth, mind you). It's the distribution of Kazaa that eats bandwidth, and even then, they distribute it via Kazaa!
Nah, they're just figuring out that they can't make money off of spyware/adware/annoyware, so they are seemingly intending to change the protocol (it's extensible, so implementing some sort of DRM is probably dooable) to profit off of all those users who are sharing their own paid for bandwidth.
If Kazaa sells out, I bet people will move to freenet, gnutella, or some other less centralized network.
Nonsense. The ethics people follow does not arise from governmental actions. If you stop downloading and you tell your friends that "theft is wrong", the situation might change. However as long as you are promoting your ethical views through hypocritical anonymous ranting that promote government-organized regulations, the rest of the world can be rather certain that your views will not become any more popular than they already are.
The truth is that the majority of people don't care all that much about copyrights and it would take something completely different from what you describe to change this situation.
The RIAA doesn't care about the artists. They want the money that comes from the royalties. And, they'll do whatever it takes to get that.
Kazaa represents not piracy but a new market. The force that you see causing havoc is due to the market not being satisfied. Just like prohibition, where there is a need it WILL be satified. Put DRM on machines... fine. Bring lawsuits on customers... fine. Employ illegal tactics to try to disrupt the services... fine. Do anything beside scratch the itch that is the percieved destroyer of your previously succesful business... fine. When you wake up to reality and things CHANGED, with or without your consent or participation, it really is not anything but your own fault for missing the "window" of time you had to embrace the new market.
This has proven to be both enevitable and incontrivertible. Intellectual property will not be respected at the loss of market. Content will continue to be king, but it's shelf life and control will be a LOT less then what has been enjoyed in the past.
As for piracy, I'm sure people are using it steal hordes of music. For my part, I use it to sample new music and I own the majority of my music. If I find songs that I like, I actually buy the album. If not, I delete them. But every day people use ordinary products for illegal means. Should we ban cars because they are used for drug trafficking?
Legally Kazaa is covered because they are a file distrubtion system whatever their organizational structure may be. IMO, the RIAA and MPAA have created the beast that they are fighting. Their strong arm tactics against ordinary users have caused businesses to resort to cloak and dagger actions or they could be sued into oblivion.
By the way, I wouldn't use the terms "fine products" and "Windows" with this crowd. You'd start a riot.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
No name "independant" artist? You mean the kind that isn't forced to process their music into mush in order to meet the recording industries version of marketable music. I don't want recording companies deciding what bands should be popular and available. I want good bands tomake it big not ones seleted by whomever to be their new "big hit".
Creative Demolition
This is where the entertainment industry tells them to go fly a kite.
I guess next bank robbers will be getting jobs delivering money to banks.
Kazaa can burn in hell.
so kazaa wants to be the 'money' of online trading? to bad their protocall sucks.. corrupt downloads and participation hacks arn't a good way to start a standard.
Kazaa is already an official distributor of viruses so sure, why not. When users want one, they pay a royalty fee. If they want to share files, the system forces the next person who wants to get it to also pay the fee.
Is this the best security/virus profit center ever or what? You trust that thing to bill you? Ha!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Have any of you recorded a movie off of the TV or perhaps changed the radio station when the commercials came on?... Just a thought but technically your stealing from the Recording Industry. Well anyway I use kazaa to get TV shows that haven't come out in the US yet. I'm an avid anime watcher and by the time an anime get's to the US I'm either not interested anymore or it's been butchered beyond recognition and completely loses the spirit of the show. I refuse to watch this processed dumbed down mush. I would rather DL it and watch the subs then to wait another 4 years to see it after it has been completely ruined.
Creative Demolition
On the surface, what you say makes sense, but after reading it twice it falls apart. You are using the "worse criminal" defense for the RIAA and MPAA. In other words, you want to "crush Kazaa" and let the RIAA and MPAA completely off, because you believe that Kazaa is the only bad guy here. Well, I've got news for you. The RIAA and MPAA (both of whom you think are blameless here), brought this whole thing upon themselves. It started with a cartel attitude they got long before Kazaa even existed. The RIAA has spent years screwing the consumer, the songwriter and the individual artist, while at the same time reciting a mantra that it claims to be HELPING them! The MPAA does the same with actors. They are trade and lobbying groups who only seek to benefit their members. I work in radio and based on your statement, the NAB is good for radio and TV. I'm sure if you ask my unemployed friend, he might give you his impressions which run quite contrary to yours (and he's a conservative republican!). Kazaa should be looked upon as the digital equilavent to the VCR. If you recall, the MPAA wanted to kill that golden goose too. Once they were smacked back by the Supreme Court, cooler heads prevailed over the rantings of Herr Valenti and now the movie industry makes OVER HALF of their income from video rentals and sales. The same could be true of p2p. P2p has the ability to make the music and movie industries TONS OF MONEY! Even 'evil' Napster wanted to cut them into this golden gravy train and their pure ignorance resulted in them again killing the golden goose! But based on your logic, a new entertainment source that had 45 million users that paid for their own storage, marketing and transportation can only be used for evil purposes..right? The bottom line is this: Given a place to BUY MP3's at reasonable prices, people do..IN DROVES! Same is likely true of movies too. Look, when CD's first came out, they cost about 3 bucks apiece to make (mostly because of the huge amount of failures that had to be tested out of each batch - they virtually had to test every individual CD). That alone justified their (almost triple) cost over vinyl. Now they stamp out CD's for a couple of pennies - yet charge more for them. I remember my friend buying an LED digital watch for 300 bucks in 1974. These days, digital watches cost 99 cents! YET the CD hasn't come down a penny! At the same time, the artists and songwriters get less (real) money then they did 25 years ago! Why? Simple greed. Nothing more, nothing less. What the RIAA wants is to kill this threat to their existance...nothing more. Why the MPAA lets Herr Valenti rant again escapes me too... What the record and movie industries don't seem to realize is that they're essentially becoming redundant. Their product isn't necessary for life like food, heat, transportation, clothes and shelter are. In a bad economy (like we have right now), those things take precedence over music and movies. Restaurants are taking it on the chin too...last week I went to my favorite one (after almost a year) and the normally full restaurant was almost empty. Car sales are so in the toilet that that they are throwing out 0% financing for five years now, hoping that someone buys! Yet, I don't see Congress passing laws making supermarkets or busses illegal. Plus, there is a huge fight for the entertainment dollar out there. Video games, digital TV, DVD, Satellite TV and radio, paint ball, fishing, camping and about 100 other things are competing for it. The RIAA and MPAA should be kissing the ground that their consumers are still loyal after them calling them criminals, rather then intimidating them in court!.
Greedy providers of a product of dubious legality from an overseas legal loophole-protected island who riddles user's computers with spyware/adware and the like
Greedy non-providers of product which is sold at artifically inflated prices, monopoly destroyers of competition, and wishes to install spyware on the computer to prevent you from fair use and privacy.
Well, they do at least have alot in common.
What the hell is the difference?
Ryan O'Rourke
I mean this most kindly, but in regards to what television is all about, I think you're missing the point.
The consumers are the little pigs that love to eat. And having "prime time" television and "late night" television et. al. you can easily seperate the little piggies into little groups. Young little pigs watch shows early on saturday morning. Sell advertising to some sugar-pumping cereal company. Middle age and older male piggies stay up later, and you can sell advertising space during late night shows for Trojan Condoms and Ford Pick-Up Trucks. Of course, lonely/unemployed/gold-digger pigglets watch soap operas during the weedkay, so you sell advertising space to Tampax and Slim Fast. Drink up little pigglets!
Throw a TiVo into the mix, and all the little pigs mix, and you don't know who is doing what and when! And the farm makes much less money.
Where exactly do the ISP's stand on this?
You don't own your line and how long till they shutdown p2p networks useing their cable? I can understand them letting piracy go on as an unoffical feature however letting companies use their bandwith and users as servers for their own services seems a little strange.
"When users want one, they pay a royalty fee. If they want to share files, the system forces the next person who wants to get it to also pay the fee. '
So you use your computer and bandwidth and kazaa gets to take a little slice of what the MPAA/RIAA charges you?
With all due respect WHAT THE FUCK ARE THESE IDIOTS THINKING? If someone has to pay to download, there is no compelling reason to share that file when finished.
When it's free (and illegal) there is a sense of community, giving something back to that community is a big reason why people rip and share these things.
When it is legal and no longer free (as in beer) the attitudes will change and kazaa will die.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
technically your stealing from the Recording Industry.
It has been well established that even distributing copyrighted songes is not 'stealing', since it doesn't lead to physical loss of property. What you describe could be illegal, but it certainly isn't _technically_ stealing.
Now the RIAA and MPAA have seen an alternate model that actually works. KaZaA is making their bid now because they know that Apple, Microsoft, and a host of other players are jumping into online distribution with both feet.
It was easy to be the poster child for disgruntled consumers before the music industry made the deal with Apple. Hell, KaZaA could get away with all kinds of bullshit that nobody would put up with from an established software company.
KaZaA's moment of maximum impact on the industry has already been passed. They're scrambling to be relevant in an industry that is finally moving into the future.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Not as a type of pay system. The brand name is far too entrenched in the 'free' mentality.
I don't care how you market it, or how you spin it....the brand Kazaa cannot coexist with the concept of "money changing hands".
If you want to use a P2P type system, that's OK (kind of once you get around ISP personal account bandwidth restrictions). But don't attempt to call it Kazaa, or Napster, or any permutation thereof. Give it some rational name.
We don't need industry middlemen jacking up prices so they can continue to take a slice anymore than we need buggy whips.
Unfortunately, we do. Those are the guys that front the money for producing and promoting the album. How many bands out there have enough cash upfront to buy serious studio time?
Now....te question is...do those middlemen take too much for their cut? Probably. That is what needs changing.
"Moral upbringing" is irrelevant, because there's no question of morality involved.
What's the moral difference between recording to analog cassette off the radio which is explicitly legal and recording to MP3 format? What's the moral differnce between tape swapping and file swapping?
Perhaps your RIAA propaganda has an answer for that. Hint: Don't try "perfect digital copy" bullshit here, you can't do that with 128K MP3 which is basically broadcast quality when ripped if everything goes right. Analog information gets lost when a 50 meg file is compressed to about 5 megs. If you were into music, maybe you'd know the difference. The difference is why people buy CDs instead of MP3s.
Most parents are of a generation that grew up recording off the radio to reel-to-reel and later casettes. They are NOT teaching kids that the slightly modernized version of what we did when we were kids is wrong, because they don't see any moral difference.
That's because there isn't any, and not all the RIAA propaganda in the world, not even that parroted here by "useful fools" and people on the RIAA payroll will cause anybody who understands the issues to see a difference.
Why have record companies paid radio stations to play back their materials for generations despite the fact that people will STEAL IT!!!? Because the only value a broadcast-quality audio track has is to promote the actual product, which is a CD album, and nobody will buy the product outside of RIAA label suit fantasies. So the record labels give away free reduced quality samples to induce people to buy the product.
Why aren't the labels thrilled to distribute their promos via P2P and Internet Radio on the dime of the listener?
They have no control over distribution, everything that hits the network has a chance that people will listen to it and buy the CD. Whether the track comes from a bedroom studio or the latest "hot new discovery" (aka n'Sync clone). And they don't have enough confidence in their ability to do a better job of making stuff people will want to hear than a no-budget indie to tolerate a level playing field.
The only difference between "stealing" via digital and legitimate tape swapping is simply that the RIAA paid to get digital recording by end users without DRM illegal back in 1992. (Audio Home Recording Act)
So leave off with the moral bullshit, the RIAA bought the law fair and square and now are openly discussing getting cyberterrorism (you want to explain how "destroying user computers" can be called anything else?) to attempt to enforce the law.
As to why CD sales are dropping, there are lots of reasons starting with the fact that fewer CDs are distributed per album, the market is fractionating into niches too small for record labels to exploit via FM radio (know how many kinds of metal there are?), the economy, etc.
P2P isn't one of the reasons. It's just another promo distribution channel. If people hear tracks they really like on P2P, they'll go buy the CD because it sounds better.
Ask Eminem. His album was prereleased via P2P and went straight to #1... notice he isn't whining about P2P cutting into his sales.
I suspect Eminem himself pre-released it. . . being smarter than the people he and perhaps you work for.
Madonna cut a track whining about EVIL PIRATES and got that into P2P channels. Her album went into the toilet and her career is following it.
As a published writer, I don't favor copyright violation. However, I don't favor making xerox machines and PCs illegal to keep my stuff from getting copied, either. I just get pissed if it gets resold. People copying it for their own use... unlike you, I get the concept of fair use.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Take any of the posts you see in this thread and replace "Kazaa/KazaaLite" with "Napster" and you have almost the exact same story...
You cannot legitimize something that is illegal. Abuse it while it is still here, because anyone who thinks that Kazaa will be any different from Napster ("dead man walking") is sadly mistaken.
User logging on... 300 baud... 300 BAUD?!? (Click!) NO CARRIER
"But you've been stealing my fruit for months and selling it in your shop" said the wise Fruit seller.
"Yes, but now I want to help you sell your fruit in my shop, I'll just take a small cut of the profit" replied the thief.
"Why would I do such a thing, you steal from me every day" asked the Fruit seller , getting annoyed by a fly.
"But now I want to buy your fruit, so that you can beat your competitors out of town" said the thief.
"I am the only fruit seller in this town", replied the fuit seller, rather confused.
If the entertainment industry gives the green light to online media distribution via p2p then how long will it be before AOL has a p2p client built into their existing proprietry software ?. I think it's very possible that if the p2p develpers don't start making strong contacts with the biggest ISP's then they could be forced out of the market that they created.
It is the bandwidth with makes p2p work, which gives the ISP's the power. The concept of p2p is now well understood and it would be easy for any large ISP to develop their own p2p software. Best case scenario is that the ISP's recongise the need for interoperability and get together to create an open standard.
Well there sure as hell not going to use my bandwidth to make money from other people *without* paying me.
We seem to be getting off topic in this thread, going back to defending/attacking filesharing itself. I'm puzzled reading the news article. Why is Kazaa doing this? They give no real mission statement or reason for wanting to become an 'official' distributor of media, whatever that is. There's nothing on their website.
There can't possibly be a good outcome from Kazaa's efforts to reach this Faustian deal. Even if an agreement is reached with record companies, it will be so tailored to their interests that users will quickly migrate to whatever new free filesharing utility is out, and they'll be in the history bin along with Napster.
Then why does Kazaa want to do this? If they feel the future is in paid-for file transfers, they betray the principles they had in launching the software (they don't approve of transferring copyright materials--Please!). Do they honestly expect to make money off this? Or are they suddenly filled with conscience and a yearing for industry respect?
We can debate all we want about the ethics of file transferring. It will go on until the day the internet is shut down, and after then we'll trade burned mp3 CDs with our friends. The only way we'll see 'official' file-transfer sites is when they're free, or so cheap that people will pay to avoid the nuisance.
I still think it's possible for record companies to make money off free music; radio stations do it for them every day. But for this to happen, there will have to be a quantum leap in how record companies view this technology, and Kazaa for now is wasting their time and credibility hoping for that to happen. Or am I missing something?
Ken:> http://keneckert.byus.net/wabbit--- You can click here to listen to mp3s from my band. Maybe it's awful music, but it's free, and no focus group told me how to record it.:>