FOSS Application Under Attack by Makers of KaZaa

Famatra writes "A story from Zeropaid indicates that maker of KaZaA, Sharman Networks, has sent a Cease and Desist Letter to the maker of KCEasy because it interoperates with their FastTrack network. The creator of KCeasy says on the KCEasy website "I feel that inclusion of FastTrack access with KCeasy is not worth a legal battle between Sharman and myself". A similar issue was covered by the Slashdot story Fight On Blizzard Vs. Bnetd Case on the right to reverse engineer to create an interoperable network. Reverse engineering to be another on the list of rights that have fallen by the wayside?"

Comments

Latest threat to P2P comes from within

[Sanity]

This is just one example of the increasing threat that Kazaa, or more precicely the companies around it, pose to innovation in the P2P space.

Perhaps the best example is their aquisition of patent #5,978,791, filed in 1997, which claims to cover the retrieval of a file across a network using a hash of the file's contents.

Set aside, for a moment, that this technique is completley obvious and has been around for decades (the earliest reference I can find is the Xanadu project from the early 90s - but I haven't looked very hard), and consider the fact that these guys could use this patent to effectively shut down almost anyone that comes up with a P2P app that doesn't have the funding to fight them in court (since most if not all modern P2P apps use this technique).

The bottom line is that companies such as Brilliant Digital Entertainment (the same nice people that were behind the adware that Kazaa is now famous for) are almost as much a threat to P2P as the better known people everybody loves to hate.

If anyone is interested, here is a more detailed article I wrote on the subject.

Re:KCEasy is just a front-end

[twitchkat]

KCEasy is simply a front-end. KCEasy makes use of giFT

KCEasy may be just a front-end, but it is a front-end developed by one of the guys heavily involved in reverse-engineering the KaZaA encryption algorithms (eg, /src/crypt/enc_type_*.c) for the giFT-fasttrack plug-in: mkern.

See:

http://cvs.berlios.de/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/gift-fas ttrack/giFT-FastTrack/src/crypt/

Maybe the KaZaA people are miffed at his reverse-engineering ways and chose to attack here rather than at the gift-fasttrack plug-in level?

Reverse Engineering is legal, but not access

[EaglesNest]

Under U.S. Copyright law, fair use allows reverse engineering of funcational components because they are ideas (or facts) not expression. However, a provisions from our friend the DMCA (17 U.S.C. 1201) makes it illegal to bypass an overt technological protection that restricts (a) access or (b) protects the rights of the author. Think of this as breaking open a safe (illegal) to get to something inside that you're allowed to copy (legal).

As for intruding on a private network, the network is composed primarily of users, if I'm not mistaken. Still, companies like E-bay have been successful in using trespass (to chattles) to keep people off their servers if they make it clear that they don't want them on there.