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Kazaa Launches Legitimacy Campaign
Beolach writes "The Washington Post has an article on Kazaa launching a $1 million advertising campaign promoting itself as a legitimate media distribution tool. From the article: 'The campaign is the latest push by the Kazaa file-sharing service and its parent company, Sharman Networks, to counter a multi-million-dollar legal and lobbying effort launched by music, software and movie firms convinced that peer-to-peer (P2P) services are a major source of online piracy'."
How will Kazaa Lite promote itself then? ;)
"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
Ouch! That hurts!
The Law of Falling Bodies
Kazaa is a major source of on-line piracy - they cannot deny this. However, P2P file sharing does have legitimate uses, and the tool cannot be blamed for what it is used for. Rat poison can be used to kill people, but that is about how it is used, not what it is.
I love kazaa. And I think this approach will help... Kazaa needs to highlight it's "other" uses...
however, many people will see this as I see the tobacco companies offering anti-smoking advice/commericals?
Public appearance is everything.
Sharing files is not against the law.
Distributing copyrighted works is.
The various P2P networks are a major source of online piracy.
Now, I'm not saying that that's all they're used for, or that they don't have legitimate uses (distribution of Linux iso images is one that springs immediately to mind), or that the various lobbying groups should succeed. But I can't see how anyone can deny that P2P is used a lot by pirates, both casual and probably organised.
Of course, so is ftp, http, etc, and I'm not saying that they should be banned either. I'm just questioning the tone of that part of the summary, is all.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
They are convinced because.....it is a major source of piracy! :)
Promoting kazaa for legitimate purposes is the right idea, it is a tool. for example ftp can be used for internet piracy as well, it is just another tool.
Warez sites claim that they only distribute games and apps to those that unluckly broke their original CDs in half.
North Korea is creating nuclar bombs just to lower unemployment - officials say.
add your own lie here!!!
I found this quote particularly interesting:
"Whenever I talk to people about Kazaa, they treat it like marijuana -- as much as they love it, they have a sense that what they're doing is a little bit wrong."
I also think the pending War on Copyright Violations is a bit like the War on Marijuana: Driven by entrenched intrests; lubricated by political donations; with lots of innocent casualties; and ultimately futile because at the end of the day it criminalizes something which is not immoral.
Who is bankrolling the campaign? How does a company, dare I say, with no visible means of support come up with the scratch? Venture capital? Dunning the sorority girls in Massey Hall? Dollar a piece so you can have your Christina Arugula, girls? I just don't see how they do it?
Illegitimate ?:
BTW, is it just me or is Kazaa's boss a stone-cold hottie?
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
I guess I need to move to something else now.....
Can I download it off Kazaa? What is the file name?
Kazaa is for the most part copyrighted music/movies and pr0n. If you remove the copyrighted stuff you will be left with the worlds biggest pr0n distribution channel. Not that I think this would be a bad thing but you will probably have a hard time persuading Joe public (OK Joe might buy it), Josephine public then that this is a Good Thing (TM)
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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The MPAA estimates that file sharing has cost the film industry more than $1 billion in the last year.
I estimate that the MPAA overestimates 125% of the stats that they estimate.
Because somebody watches a pirated movie does not directly mean that anybody lost money over it. Money is only lost if that person would have paid money but instead watched it for free.
Apart from the question of who is actually financing this and what they hope to get from it, the idea is good.
The next year will see a massive publicity campaign from the top 5 music companies as they try to exaggerate the impact of p2p ("try" is what I mean, cause I believe the impact is really huge), in the hope that this will allow them to merge into 2 or 3 companies.
Without some anti-publicity, it means a lot more of the "hacker pirates stealing music" stories. Kazaa are not my choice for a champion, I'd prefer someone like Michael Robertson of mp3.com fame. But it's a start.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Isn't this like the "guns are not made for killing people" argument?
P2P networks were designed to a) distribute files, b) without a central authority that could limit what gets distributed. It is a given that people will distribute things they otherwise can't.
So even if guns have theoretical uses besides killing or hurting people, it is their primary function. Just like the primary function of P2P networks are to allow sharing of digital content, regardless of copyright. Good people want to share what they enjoy; it's the same basic psychology as inviting somebody over for a dinner you've spent hours cooking. You are proud of it, and you want other people to experience what you liked to experience, to make them feel as good as you did. Humans are not alone about this; the same behavior can be seen in all primate species - especially with regards to sharing food in a community.
However, in the specific case of P2P networks, you still get to keep what you are sharing. Therefore, the cost of sharing - to the sharer - is close to zero. Hence the effortlessness of sharing gigs and gigs of movies, games, you name it. Myself, I share about 350G of unnamed media, and that puts me in the lesser ranks of my P2P communities.
Note here: I personally believe that the concept of copyright needs some serious overhaul; when 50 million people believe something is right and some 10,000 believe it is wrong, then by the laws of most countries, it cannot be wrong for a long time more. But that is another issue; I just wanted to point out that "P2P has legitimate uses" is a rather weak argument.
I've already seen the adverts over here in the UK - I've seen them in several papers over the last week or so.
Gentlemen, start your penguins
Owning a legal gun is not against the law.
;-)
Shooting copyright lawyers is.
Disclaimer: Anybody is free to interpret this post as any combination of anti/pro-guns, anti/pro-file, anti/pro-piracy and anti/pro-shooting
They should just say:
"Tell your lawmakers that you want free copyrighted material or you won't vote for them."
That's just not a very tasteful way to promote your service, IMHO.
You seem to believe that copyright is a God-given impeccable right.
It isn't. It is a man-made construct that can and should be changed if society as a whole benefits from another model.
Of course, with any change of order comes fierce resistance from those who will lose from the new order. That has always been the case; already Machiavelli knew this.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
There was a full page Kazaa advert in Britain's Guardian newspaper yesterday - I wondered if it was part of something larger.
I'm interested as to what sort of debate it provokes. I forgot to buy a copy today, and there's nothing relevant on the letters page on their website, but does anyone else know?
Personally, I can't stand Kazaa, having had to clear what felt like gigabytes of spyware off a load of office machines last year. I've never used it, and I really don't want to if that's how they treat their customers.
They say that "guns don't kill people, people kill people." Well I think the gun helps. If you just stood there and yelled BANG, I don't think you'd kill too many people.
I mean when you really think about it... We should ban IRC as well. I mean even though you can talk over it, you could trade files. FTP is really a rude protocal as well, since 0day warez (I hope i spelled that right) also resides on these evil ip's. Piracy is going to happen, whether it be a neat package, or a barebones one.
:)
I think Jim Carey once said "SomeBody has to Kill the BabySitter" applies here
Sharman's been playing the "us vs. the recording industry" game way too long to try to create any impression of legitimacy now. Maybe if they'd made a concerted effort (and not just a hide behind enough legalese to cover their asses) from day one to discourage copyright infringement, they might have a shot at it.
But they didn't, and they don't. And if they had, they certainly wouldn't be in the position they were today as the household name in file "sharing".
Sharing files is not against the law...
Distributing copyrighted works is.
Sometimes... if you're not the author, if you're not a librarian or a lawyer, if the copyright is valid in your country and hasn't expired, and there's no implicit permission or explicit license... and if you do actually make copies, rather than distributing the same copyrighted work that you received...
Why do people make out that copyright is so simple as the DRM people say it it? It's a complex subject, and contains more information than you can contain in a 1-bit "copyrighted? Y/N" flag.
This text I just wrote is copyrighted. Your browser just copied it. Why? because there's implicit permission.
First off, since they give Kazaa away, where is the money for the ad campaign coming from?
;~)
Secondly, if the MPAA & RIAA are both doing so badly, where are all the broke movie and music superstars?
Now some editorial comments.
The real theft is the loss of freedom which comes as corporations work to stripmine the benefits of common property. We all gain when something is created, discovered or shared. People who create should be rewarded if even only for the reason they can then create more. By restricting what is commonly and freely available, we all lose, and for the sole benefit of those who are already affluent.
Furthermore, as the overly affluent use this unearned excessive wealth to further corrupt the legal and political processes, we all move closer to the prepice of corruption which all previous great civilizations have fallen off.
Words to men, as air to birds.
Your efforts are futile. You think you can compete against me and come out on top? It is a useless endeavor. Go ahead and try! Mwahahaha! Your's Truly, Illegal File Sharing
the campaign is destined to fail. People generally say that P2P has legitimate uses, and is being used in a non-copyright-infringing way, but unless these people can provide some data to back up their claim no one will believe them. I am ambivalent to the whole P2P thing, and I don't even believe that P2P is used legitimately much of the time.
However, what will happen if someone does gather these usage statistics and the result is that
Be honest: what are the chances of that happening?
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
P2P *IS* a "major source of online piracy".
The question is: Does it truely hurt music sales too? One side says Yes!, the other No! but BOTH are manipulating the stats to prove their case. I Don't know who to trust... Probably neither.
As for legitimizing Kazaa as a media distribution tool... FTP is a legitimate tool and it's used for pirating. IRC and USENET were NOT inteded to distribute files.. but they are used for pirating. The only one that seems DESIGNED for pirating is P2P. Sure it has legitimate uses, but honestly, until indy artists (who use P2P like a label) make up a majority of the content.. It's a pirating tool... Accept it.
Sounds like the old 'offer it free then jack up the price trick'. The trouble with that is that the customers you get by giving things away free are not the ones that are going to make you rich down the track.
[url=www.vitalise.com.au/web-design.htm]Vitalise Web Design[/url]
Were legal because we said so!
Everyone on this board "seems" to hate ad-ware and spy-ware like GATOR. Kazaa Installs GATOR.
Why are you supporting this awful piece of crap?
www.thejulingtoncreekplantaion.com
Kazaa is a lot like LSD:
1. Designed by scientists in search for cure.
2. Found to be useful in getting high.
3. Agencies experimented with it to see if it's suitable for their own evil needs.
4. Although some legitimate (medical) uses were possible, it was determined to be a drug and thus declared illegal and prohibited for any use.
5. Still wanted by end users and therefore still around in pure form or in variations.
6. Variations, shall we say, vary, therefore it's very difficult to say which is original stuff and which is not.
Like it or not, but it's there and it's not getting away easily. Some publicity sure helps.
I like my outfit, it's inexpensive, but cool -- April Ryan
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
It is exactly the same argument as "guns are not made for killing people" - and both arguments are correct.
Blaming a gun for a murder is senseless and sophmoric and blaming a file distribution technology for piracy is as well. People have "warez" ftp sites where piracy occurs, does this mean ftp needs to be abolished? How about the internet in general?
It is a simple mathematical case of failing to find the common denominator. People pirate files using ftp. People pirate files using http. People pirate files using P2P. Do you see the common denominator here?
People kill with knives. People kill with vehicles. People kill with guns. People kill with clubs. Did you find the common denominator in this one?
In case you missed it - the answer is "people". If you want to stop piracy you have to make "people" stop doing it - not disable or outlaw the technology and if you want to stop murders you have to make people stop killing each other, not outlaw or abandon guns, knives, etc.
But that's not easy, is it? It's easier to abolish guns than address the *REAL* problem of dealing with people. It's a cop-out.
reminds me of a story: One night a woman is on a street corner looking for something when a man wanders up. He can see the lady's distress and asks what the problem is. The lady tells him that she lost a hundred dollar bill and is looking for it - so the man starts helping her look. After a bit of searching he asks the lady where she thinks she may have dropped it and the lady responds by pointing down the street through the darkness a block away. Puzzled, the man asks the lady why she is searching here? Pointing to the overhead streetlamp above them the lady responds "because the light is better".
We cannot, as a society, try to find the answer to problems where it is easiest to look because, quite simply, the answer simply isn't there. It is far more difficult to find the "answer" to murder is in people, the "answer" to piracy is in people. A far more daunting fix may be in order but it is the correct one. Anything else is as futile as looking for lost money in a place where the light is better.
Shooting people is against the law. Lawyers are not people. Shooting laywers is not against the law. Quod erat demonstrandum.
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
Kazaa's owners, Sharman Networks, is showing the OpenSource community the way to win this P2P file sharing war with the RIAA & MPAA. It would behoove us to pay attention. The OpenSource community should imitate their ad campaign. It would be money well spent. The sooner this war is politicised the better. The only way Congress is going to pay attention to our conserns is when it begins to cost them politically. Ad campaigns are by far the surest way to get their attention.
Intrinsically tied in the kernel, so nobody will be able to recompile the kernel of *any* distribution or MS and all your personal data will go to a humongous repository where it will be analyzed by tenths of millions of burochrats.
Finally, the Matrix is here
They also had the ads in our campus newspaper. Looks like they're going after the audience that uses file sharing the most. (As an ironic aside, our university has blocked Kazaa at the router level, so we can't even use the product being advertised.)
Want Slashdot headlines on your site? Try SlashHead
You idiots...have you ever seen a demonstration actually work?
The answer is: No. Nobody cares what a bunch of whiney hippies think.
I have used Napster,gnutella,Morpheus and Kazaa lite.Why?Not to get anything that is legitimate but copyrighted music.Not because i dont want to spend any money but because i cant get here in london what i want.
I dont have a problem if i want to listen britney boobs and company.their music is everywhere.
But good flamenco and jazz is impossible to get.most of it is simply not available anywhere.
so what am i doing ? violating the rights of the artists or am i keeping their legacy alive, some of those artists long dead.
Wanted : A Signature.
" Owning a legal gun is not against the law. Shooting copyright lawyers is."
Ohhhhh.................oops...........
~UltraSkuzzi
This comment is liscensed by SCO.
it's also not quite clear that making an exact duplicate copy, where it does not degrade the original, is "theft".
it's infringement of copyright. just like when people used to tape albums for their friends, just on a different scale.
There are no trolls. There are no trees out here.
I think many people would be a little reluctant to use a service called eDonkey for their porn.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
The USA does not produce Biological Weapons
Are you claiming that McDonald's Corporation is not an American company?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Don't forget those of us who are anti/pro-legal ownership of property.
Shows how much you know.
If anything, the demonstrations kept the troops there longer.
Seems like a pretty weak campaign. A million is very little when you consider that:
a) first you have to pay an ad adjency to develop your ads in several different media;
b) then you have to distribute the material;
c) then you have to pay for the material to appear e.g. in newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV; and
d) you have to repeat c) over a time frame e.g. weeks, months.
It sounds like a lot but a million will actually be spread very thinly. Remember, they are trying to reach the "public" not just a niche market. Since they're competing with an industry which owns every aspect of advertising (from the firms to the media) and hence can exploit advertising with maximum efficiency, it really looks like Kazaa is peeing in the wind. Better to invest the money in better service and hope for word-of-mouth popularity.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I agree, they could use their $$ to get stuff changed. But, in the end, it's their $$. Music is a thought -- you can't buy or sell thoughts. Hell, you really can't even price a thought. And one thing's for sure -- I'm not payin' $20 for 15 thoughts!
mmm....caffeine....
I'm satisfied with any margin being used for legal purposes...and I'll give you an example. RedHat is legitimately distributed via BitTorrent. Frankly, I don't believe in group punshment -- if a small group of people have a legitimate use for something, there's no reason to tear it down.
It's clear that Bittorrent is being used to distribute both legal and illegal content. I don't know the percentages, and with regards to the discussion of legality, I don't care. With regard to arguing over percentages, it's pretty easy to draw parallels to the DeCSS lawsuits (where the legitimate users of this software were Linux users -- but because they were a minarity, they were ignored). This was a bullshit case with an outcome that I still view as completely unjust.
The fact is, P2P is a tool. It can be both used and misused. Further, the implications for the common person to be able to publish any type of document and distribute it on a massive scale with a cost approaching nil are great. I view this alone to be a greater threat to mass media than piracy. It's their content. If they want to distribute it with loads of DRM -- fine. I jsut won't buy it. If they can't innovate fast enough -- fuck 'em.
-Turkey
Ok, reading your post brought to mind a question I've had for a while now, and I wonder if the good people here at slashdot can answer it. I use Kazaa Lite to download copyrighted material. But the material I download is all stuff that I have legally purchased. Until recently I hadn't found a good quality ripping program that didn't take exceptionally long, and was free, and could make mp3's, so I would download songs of my cd's that I bought at a store. I would then burn those mp3's onto a single disc that my car stereo can play so I could have hundreds of songs on one disc. Would this be considered illegal or unethical?
This space for rent, inquire within.
let the big companies with billions of dollars fight each other over p2p software usage instead of using it on R&D or somthing else useful, no wonder everone is going bankrupt.
-Tim Louden
This assumption - that p2p networks were designed to exempt users from central authority - would only be a safe one if p2p networks did not also exhibit other highly useful benefits. One such benefit is the ability to aggregate and distribute access to an ad hoc collection of data, amortizing transfer costs over as many internet connections as there are users. There are many companies developing p2p as a way to cut down on server and bandwidth costs when distributing their business software. Googling for "p2p distribute business software" reveals quite a lot of activity in this realm. The plain fact is that p2p networks are very good at spreading out distribution costs.
"P2P has legitimate uses" would seem an accurate and powerful statement.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
spent an estimated $50,000,000.00 and look what happened to it. $1 million is a drop in the ocean.
Shareaza is much better program than emule. For a long time I preffered the combo of bittorrent + emule to kazaa (lite). But emule kept running my net connection into the ground so I couldn't surf the web(unless I wanted to wait minutes for each page download).
Shareaza (google to find its homepage. At a guess I would say shareaza.com). actually supports 4 different protocols: overnet (which emule uses), bittorrent (which the original bt client uses), gnutella 2, and gnutella. And I like the interface much better too.
Go on. Go try it.
BTW, the reason I don't use kazaa any more is that it doesn't have the range that shareaza has.
They did the same thing in the student newspaper here at Penn State. I thought it was targeted at us because the school has decided to give free Napster access to all (on-campus) students and then block Kazaa from the network.
A $1mil campaign to change it's image with regards to piracy? Who cares?!
Kazaa is the satan of virus and crap. It'll take them $100mil campaign to convince me otherwise.
Like everyone else here, I'm the "tech-support" for my circle of friends and family. Sometimes that's OK, sometimes it's a huge bummer. So, I've learned over the years how to draw certain lines. For example, if someone asks me to help fix a computer problem and I learn that they've so much as installed Kazaa... forget it; they're on their own... No need to waste my time where sheer stupidity has preceeded my friendly efforts.
Kazaa is a major source of on-line piracy - they cannot deny this. However, P2P file sharing does have legitimate uses, and the tool cannot be blamed for what it is used for. Rat poison can be used to kill people, but that is about how it is used, not what it is.
I hate to point out the obvious, but illegal copying IS a legitimate and JUST use. Copyrights are what's unjust, copyrights are the tool used to wrongly restrict copying that people have no moral or inherent right to restrict. Type in "against copyrights" in any internet search engine, and it won't be long before you see exactly what I mean. Learn the truth and the truth shall set ye free!
Stop modding down the truth just because it doesn't help your agenda.
You can weave bullshit arguments about drug violence and gangs for the marijuana or about artists not getting money with the downloaded music all you want. No one will listen because they know that those arguments are bullshit. Unless they are clinically ignorant.
This attitude that I'm somehow violating someone by copying things is bogus morality. Sorta like saying you're going to hell if you don't follow the Kings choosen religion. Well I call bullshit. If you stole my car, yes I would feel violated, but if you just want to make a copy - hell, have two. Infact, it's a Geo, there are 10 million coppies. I dont feel violated. Perhaps I mow my lawn with vertical stripes instead of horizontal, well please, copy that too! I promose I won't feel violated either, nor will I try to collect royalties. In fact, I might feel complemented.
Of course, maybe it's illegal copying, but then again maybe it's illegal to sit at the front of the bus too. So what! I hate to point out the obvious, but freely copying, especially music, is inherently good and beneficial.
Yeah, but try finding a lawyer to defend you on that on. :-(
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
music that is written for profit/market saturation all shares the same atribute: it sucks!
and on the software side of things.. closed software is just going to have to try better copyright protection methods. if you want to keep your stuff from being copied why do you write it on disks and sell them? duh..
besides the only music that you can get reliably on P2P is popular stuff that is made for profit/market saturation and it sucks!
It's clear that Bittorrent is being used to distribute both legal and illegal content.
BitTorrent is very different from Kazaa though.
BT provides P2P downloads only. Kazaa distributes not just downloading, but also searching. It's the searching part that makes it a threat.
If a person wants to use BT for copyright infringement, she'd still got to put up a webpage hosting the torrent file. She's just as legally vulnerable as if the entire file was on the webserver. There is a single point of blame, so traditional methods like C&D or DMCA enforcement can punish sharers. Legal and illegal users are completely separated from each other- if you only use BT to get RedHat ISOs, no data supporting copyright infringement will pass through your PC.
But Kazaa uses peers to support searching for files as well. If someone encodes a DVD and puts it on Kazaa, then search requests and responses for that file will go through ever system on the Kazaa network. Infringing and noninfringing users are all mixed together in one big mesh. This puts Kazaa at a greater risk of law enforcement action.
So they ARE making money from this. Doesn't that go against the set of beliefs that, while believing the current copyright system is wrong, also holds that one should not be able to profit from other people's work without their permission? Isn't that one of the tenets of the OSS movement? Using this for-profit, proprietary software, with the only excuse that it can be used legitimately to distribute Free and OS software, actually goes against the beliefs of Free and OS software advocates.
Sniff, sniff...yup that is hypocrisy I smell.
You've made your point with respect to copyright; there seems to have been no copying. But the trademark angle remains open.
In fact, if I had seen the video before it was widely distributed under the name "Star Wars Kid,"
Are you sure that Fox and Lucasfilm won't be able to argue in court that distributing a video file under the name "Star Wars Kid," with the content you describe, constitutes infringement of Lucasfilm's rights in the name "STAR WARS"?
Will I retire or break 10K?
The advantage of using a network like Kazaa instead of a Bittorrent client is in the volume of files your able to share. Leaving a torrent up for multiple files can become cumbersome quickly and if your looking at sharing thousands of files, impossible. P2P clients like Kazaa are useful and just because it has been used primarily to redistribute copyrighted material does not mean that there is no legitimate use.
I redistribute freely published music and iso's, I keep my copyrighted/consumer music and software in separate folders.
I do believe sharing copyrighted property is a problem, but its important that we fight to keep the RIAA/MPAA et all from demonizing P2P and criminalizing our right to redistribute free information. P2P has a potential usefulness we haven't even begun to touch on and it would be a shame to lose it to rampant industry paranoia and money grubbing.
As the GPL (and OSS in general) are just beginning to penetrate the public consciousness it is possible over time we will be looking at a renaissance in the public commons, and I can think of no better way to help that happen then to help to build a large distributed and publicly searchable network of useful information. Enter P2P.
Quack, quack.
Jack Valenti, cleaning up his house last weekend, found $1 million tucked beneath the cushion of one of his diamond-embroidered chaise lounges. He was nonplussed.
I'm not how well a million bucks of advocacy is going to fare against the abysally-deep pockets of the American entertainment industry...
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Yeah -- a wholeheartedly agree with you on that one. There's a single point of origin on the Kazaa network -- the service itself. That's the weakness.
BT has even less accountability than you suggest, with "rogue" sites like suprnova and the associated mirrors -- and many of these sites also provide links or redirects to .torrent files. It makes me wonder about how a system like freenet would work along these lines of legal accountability. Freenet works sort of like BT, except file chunks are distributed around the network in a pseudo-random fashion, so a user doesn't know what content they're hosting on their computer. I guess in that case, the "linker" is held responsible. This brings up free speech issues, since information (and speech) need to be protected. It's not illegal for me to tell you where the guy selling pirate DVD's is -- why would it then be illegal for me to give you a location of a seed?
Technically, I'd contend that it's perfectly legal to provide such information. What it really comes down to is that IP owners (or anyone else, really) can sue for whatever they want to. Most folks don't have the resources necessary to fight a suit against one of the "big boys" -- therefore, all file sharers are going to have to either bow to their whim, or fly under their radar (like using Kazaa to swap torrent tracker files).
-Turkey
Gave Kazaa $1M to advertise with?
Microsoft says it is secure, Linux companies say they are ready for the desktop and Matrix fans are completely happy with the latest movie. Propaganda is still propaganda.
Linux Resources
Kazaa can be used for distributing content that you don't want to have a single point of failure.
http: and ftp: can't, for obvious reasons.
Neither can bittorrent because of the central role of the tracker.
So, say you're looking to disseminate information about... oh I don't know.. Diebold rigging election machines, or perhaps a video of the President performing a ritual human sacrifice or some other such sensitive material.
Now, since in these cases you might be worried about jack-booted thugs breaking down your door and putting a round through your hard-drive and/or skull, you need some way to not only get the file out there, but be sure that the file can continue to get out there even if you're no longer connected.
P2P, and therefore Kazaa, provides this.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
Registering your business as an offshore company in order to avoid lawsuits isn't a great step towards making your company look legitimate.
Macintosh humor! MacComedy.com
"The Washington Post has an article on Kazaa launching a $1 million advertising campaign promoting itself as a legitimate media distribution tool. From the article: 'The campaign is the latest push by the Kazaa file-sharing service and its parent company, Sharman Networks, to counter a multi-million-dollar legal and lobbying effort launched by music, software and movie firms convinced that peer-to-peer (P2P) services are a major source of online piracy'."
Why can't it be both? The fact that it's a legitimate tool for media distribution is exactly what makes it a good source of online piracy! It does both pretty well. Even if it's good for getting movies/music/software, though, I wont take it seriously due to it's rampant use of adware and the fact that it's hideously designed...
"I've got to stop masturbating! It makes me too lazy! Stop it, Albert. Stop it." -- Albert Einstein
Yeah, I do the same thing at restaurants. I eat a little off each person's plate as I wonder around.
That is quite possibly the worst analogy I've ever seen.
s'wut i sed.
There's a single point of origin on the Kazaa network -- the service itself.
I've never used Kazaa myself, but I don't think that's how it works. Unlike Napster, the people at Kazaa.com don't run any special servers. If everyone at the Kazaa company vanished tommorrow, the file sharing would continue to work as long as their users kept on running local copies of Kazaa.exe.
The network survives without any single point of origin. That's why Kazaa wasn't vulnerable to the same kind of lawsuit that destroyed Napster. (Note that Roxio's "Napster 2.0" has nothing to do with the original Napster that I just mentioned)
fah. FileDonkey happens to be a much larger and much faster form of p2p, and gets past any firewall specifically blocking kazaa and the like, as it uses many different servers. All hail El Mule!
So let's help Kazaa out here. What do you use Kazza for (other than swapping copyrighted material)? I don't mean what else you could potentially use it for, but what else do you actually use it for?
I wonder why the porn industry isn't more up in arms than the RIAA is. They probably lose more potential business than the RIAA; is it becasue the porn industry doesn't rely on investments for livelyhood as much as the music industry does, and thus their company value isn't as pertinent to their success?
At least on Kazaa, it seems as if getting specific songs, and complete songs, is next to impossible. That, and nearly every search returns at least half a dozen instances of porn (unless I simply search for music, in which case it's only one or two). On the other hand, if someone searches for porn, it's likely little else will show up.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Kazaa would have a one-page ad with nothing but a black border, saying "Got Spyware?"
Kazaa Lite would have the opposing one-page ad with nothing but a black border, saying "We don't."
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
I don't know the specifics of how Kazaa works either, but I'm not sure that I agree with you.
First of all, Sharman Networks do not reside in the US. This helps to indemnify them from the US' grasp. Secondly, Kazaa is also different from Napster (in the eyes of the law) because it doesn't exclusively facilitate music downloads. Kazaa is a file sharing service -- which includes music, but is not limited to it. Finally, I do use Kazaa, and in order for Kazaa to work there needs to be a metaserver for you to query at startup (which will point you to the other nodes/supernodes). Sharman needs to host this metaserver...otherwise, nodes will not communicate. This is why you need to get as torrent tracker file for Bittorrent to work -- there aren't any centralized servers (or metaservers) to search with.
-Turkey
Oh wait, I guess their off the hook too, if you listen to the EFF.
Part of what people forget about the whole internet P2P and music "must equal" bad evil piracy equation is that it is often simply and painfully false. Consider...
I have several years worth of consistent migration of data on my computer. (e.g. directories that go back 5 years and have been accumulating crud for that long.) Several times in interval my computer was a "common asset" of the house (free for random roommate use).
I have reciently relaized that I have five different song variants of "little bunny foo foo" ensconced in a music folder and this prompted me to remember a discussion.
It seems that I and my roomate were discussing the (musical) idea of "variations on a theme" and we settled on looking for little bunny foo foo variants spesifically because of its parallells to "twinkle twinkle little star." [Look up variants on that classic theme, it is fairly fascinating.]
We did this using (the original) napster.
This was an act of casual, everyday scholarship that was completely singularly enabled by (classic) napster in a way that iTunes (or modern napster) can not satisfy. It was very "star trek" in that we went to the computer, asked it for a spesific datum, and got a good and immediate cultural cross-section without ads, fluff, "curent marketing influences", or spending $.99 per sample or anything. The intellectual question was asked, persued, and answered. Which is, in theory, the goal of having the internet in the first place.
The very P2P nature of napster provided the instant set-processing that was singularly apporprate to the discussion. The proper set-theory intersection of "all available music that people found actively interesting (enough to put online) at that time" and "all versions of little bunny foo foo" was representitive and interesting and the conversation was valuable and enlightening.
It wouldn't have been worth $5 to search out and buy the individual tracks, partly because these tracks are hideous, but more-so because the search itself if done today (by artist and label across different sites and comercial interests) would have killed the casual curiosity that engendered the research.
Also, since one of the "tracks" is Cartman (from South Park) singing a snippit of LBFF, that wouldn't even *BE* available because it isn't a proper "musical track".
So I don't listen to these tracks, and there there isn't even a remote possiblity that I would have ever bought these tracks. (god do they reak. 8-) Their availability was, however, immediatly useful at a purely intellectual level.
===
Another original napster persuit was picking a song title, searching that song title, and then, rather than downloading that title you would pick one near-by poster of that title and explore their share directory jus to see what they had and how they had chosen to label and group their downloads.
Or just look at all the variant "genre" tags for one spesific title.
This is, I beleive, the nature and type of research the P2P-scraping companies are selling to the RIAA.
It certianly was a way to find new directions to explore. For example, I am "too old" for Green Day's demographic, but I was share-space-scraping and I found the song "Warning". The title alone was interesting enough to prompt a listen. Now I am "sparse fan" of their work.
(and I *BUY* what I like)
That would never have happened in the non-P2P for-pay systems as they exist today.
With only corporate and marketing input but with no personal personality to go by, there are no "threads of interest" to see and follow in the sterilized offerings.
===
The cancerous idea that only students or professors at formal institutions ever engage in scholarship is anathma to the cultural mind.
Worse, the partitioning of music into "offerings" and "services" and the concommitant exclusion of things because "that's not music, its comedy" (etc) is the kind of commercialization that silently destroys cas
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
you smell only your putrescent misunderstanding, starting w/ the malodorous conflation of "free software" and "open source software", moving onto the fetid projection of belief systems onto the motivations of people you don't know, and topping it off w/ a plain-stinky dollop of puerile simplification and smugly blamecasting.
(of course, where there's shit there's flies, hence my response in kind... ;-)
"music, software and movie firms convinced that peer-to-peer (P2P) services are a major source of online piracy"
Uh, was there ever any question about this?
Downloading something to which you own the an original copy of isn't illegal.
Sharing it to others who also own it isn't illegal.
Sharing it to people who don't own it is illegal.
How does one tell the difference between 'legal' downloads and those that are not? Simple answer is you can't.
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If you're religishitty, KILL YOURSELF!
If the system wasn't wholly corrupt and owned by corporate interests...
It isn't - there are many good and decent things left in the "system". Yes, there is corruption, and yes, many people dishonestly buy and sell influence, but you think things are worse than they actually are. Don't do that - it is cannot justify your own wrongs.