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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'."
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.
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.
Isn't a lot of the pr0n copyrighted as well? I mean, not that i would know...
So basically take out the pr0n, take out the music, take out the movies and other copyrighted materials. What's left?
World's Funniest Home Videos.
it always depends on what most people do with it.
:)
Naming a thing "Rat Poison" doesn't means that is for rats. If *most* of the ppl used it to kill other ppl, it's not rat poison.
Naming a basooka: toothpick doesn't makes it a toothpick
Why do you think copyrights doesn't apply to porn?
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 do think copyright applies to pr0n, its just the pr0n industry is currently not as vigourous in their defense of it as say the RIAA. Plus a lot of it is just snippets most of the time people do not download the whole thing as is the case with music and other movies
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
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.
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
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.
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