Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
That the developers of Kazaa are strict believers in tough copyright law. This is simply an extension of that view.
Kazaa sends a cease and desist letter to YOU!
Sounds like Kazaa is fighting the same sort of thing for the same sort of reason except that in the case of chat, one must connect to the central servers of the chat netowrk. Can Kazaa really claim ownership-like rights to a network that doesn't depend on their servers for functionality? It would seem that Kazaa has created a Frankenstein monster . . . that perhaps they cannot wholly control . . .
Dude, that isn't a good analogy by any stretch of the imagination. Kazaa doesn't own its own network, because it's set up using its users' bandwidth; it doesn't in fact provide very much at all, besides the client. After Napster and Audiogalaxy there isn't much in the way of centralization in these networks. What does this mean? It means that KCEasy provides as much of the "network" infrastructure as the real clients. Nothing of Sharman Networks' bandwidth or computing resources are being used up, so why do they get to say who can come in and who stays out?
... Ford Motors, inc. has announced its patent on "ROAD", a network protocol for piloting land vehicles. Several other companies, including General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen, Nissan, and Uncle Hiram's Buggies also make vehicles that are compatible with the ROAD protocol.
Ford has threatened to sue these companies, alleging that they reverse-engineered key parts of ROAD, including the maximum width of allowable vehicles, and the use of round "wheels" for efficient travel on ROAD networks.
-3Suns
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The Revolution will be Slashdotted
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-faMaybe the KaZaA people are miffed at his reverse-engineering ways and chose to attack here rather than at the gift-fasttrack plug-in level?
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.
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
i'm tired of all these folks making up "rights" that don't exist.
And I'm tired of people thinking we don't have rights just because they aren't spelled out in the Constitution. Remember, the Constitution limits the rights of the government, it doesn't grant the people rights. We have them to begin with.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Sharman say it is not their network. They say that they only supply the software.
That is why they are allowed to continue in business, and that is why they are not liable for any copyright infringement that takes place on the network.
The only possible basis therefore for preventing other people from writing software that can connect to the same third party networks that their software connects to is patent infringement.