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Secret Kazaa Documents Revealed in Court
Dan Warne writes "A fascinating range of Kazaa's internal documents were revealed in Federal Court in the ongoing court case against the Australian-based company today. One extraordinary philosophical manifesto by the company's chief technical officer showed that he was aware that Kazaa's activities were a huge legal risk. He also feared being 'out-innovated' by other P2P programs that didn't come bundled with adware. "if consumers can connect to FT (as well as Gnutella 2, eDonkey and Bittorrent) and it has no ads or adware then it would seem a good choice," Philip Morle says in the his manifesto. The documents are full of all sorts of other admissions-that-you'd-be-crazy-to-put-on-paper like how Kazaa employees "hate" installing the Kazaa Media Desktop on their machines because all the bundled adware slows your machine down and can hijack your web browser."
just incase of the slashdot effect:
The Sale of Kazaa
Team Sharman came to court today with a strategic shift in direction: the revolution would now be a secret.
Their legal team presented a draft set of undertakings designed to suppress non-confidential documents from the media. It could have been a great plan if the Judge didn't think it was so crap, and with no supporting evidence for the basis of claim to confidentiality, Judge Wilcox swept away the majority of the claims for confidentiality by Altnet and Sharman.
There were 30 Altnet documents and four Sharman documents they didn't want publicised. We'll go through the Sharman documents today, and the Altnet documents later in the week.
The first item for discussion here at the Daily Dispatch is a 28 page contract between Kazaa B.V and Sharman, titled: Agreement for the Sale and Purchase of the Business and certain Assets of Kazaa B.V.
Buried within the most standard legal contract that makes you want to stab your eyeballs out, are the following nuggets of information.
When Kazaa's original Dutch owners got the jitters from pending US litigation by the music industry, the company was sold to Sharman for 600,000 Euros (about $1 million) to be paid in three installments. The purchase price included all company assets for the provision of p2p enabled software (which includes advertisement space for display advertising) to let users search and download files from other users.
Plus, all business and registered intellectual property rights, confidential information (defined as processes, methods, formulae, financial data, customer and supplier lists, marketing information, test results and reports, project reports, testing procedures, development manuals, training manuals, market forecasts, sales targets and stats, price sensitive information, research reports, business development reports), and all Internet domain names.
Bored yet? The sale took place in the Amsterdam offices of Van Doome at De Lairessestraat, and following the sale, Kazaa BV would have to change its name. Sharman was indemnified against all debts and liabilities and blah blah blah standard contract stuff. All employees were sacked after the sale (nice). Kazaa B.V ensured there was no Trade Union agreements or disputes in place at the time of sale. If there was, the leftie bastards would understand anyway, because every revolution starts a bit nasty. Of course, today Sharman enjoys the full support of a devoted staff that would never be treated so shoddily by their benevolent bosses if there were cause to up and move from a jurisdiction under legal duress. It's a revolution, it's Us against Them, it's Mabo, it's the vibe of the thing.
The Sales Agreement further confirms that when all employees were sacked, there was no way anyone could come back and haunt them to "assert any moral right in respect of any Business Intellectual Property Right." And if they did, then Zenstrom and Friis would be stung for it, not Sharman. So I'm guessing all employees were made to sign a contract as thick and dense as this one to make sure they kept quiet.
The original owners, Niklas "Skype" Zennstrom and Janus Friis were forbidden from competing with Sharman in any way for 3 years.
The deal was to be kept secret and not announced without the written consent of Sharman. The Sales Agreement was construed in accordance with the laws of England and subject to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the English courts.
There were two clauses that seemed a bit odd. Under Schedule 3 of Vendor Warranties is the subheading Litigation. Clause 5.1 says:
Save as disclosed in the Litigation Letter, the Vendor (Kazaa B.V) is not a plaintiff or defendant in or otherwise a party to any litigation relating to the Business, which are in progress or threatened in writing or pending against the Vendor. So far as the Vendor is aware, no governmental or official investigation or inquiry concerning the Vendor is in progress or pending.
Th
Kazaa says: No Spyware
Spot the difference, people!
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
Because they have "adware", not "spyware". A ridiculous distinction that allows many companies to morally justify their inclusion of such horrible pieces of code in their products.
/end rant
Just peek at Messenger Plus v3 (an add on for MSN Messenger) -- they include LOP in their installer, which hijacks your browser, your searches, adds a toolbar, and adds icons to your desktop, and is one of the most annoyingly difficult things to clean on your own. The Plus 'company' justifies it in that it's "adware", not "spyware", and that the user opted in when installing by not un-checking the default install option. What comes next is a hellish exercise of peering into the most obscure parts of the registry to kill the re-spawners that make the spyware^H^H^H^Hadware come back on reboot when things look clean.
It's hard to take the word of someone who is stating incorrect information.
Skype is created by the original developers of Kazaa, but the original developers did not include any spyware/adware in KaZaa. The spyware/adware was added to Kazaa after it was sold to Sharman.
Step 1 of 4
Kazaa file sharing application with: Bullguard Virus Protection, Altnet Topsearch.
Kazaa is a free download supported by advertising from Cydoor, the GAIN Network and InstaFinder.
Altnet PeerPoints Manager Package, an application that rewards you for sharing on Kazaa including My Search Toolbar and P2P Networking Application.
Sharman Networks respects your privacy. Read the privacy policy. You must also agree to the user license agreements linked from below before continuing.
[ ] I agree to the Kazaa Media Desktop End User License Agreement and Altnet PeerPoints Manager Package End User License Agreements.
Seems it's just as polluted with spyware as it has always been.
A lot of tech companies use it to describe th practice of using their own products in house. That's also where to discover many of the problems that infuriate customers.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Ha.
I'd say I'm far from stupid - not a genius of course, but I do enough knowledge to administrate Unix and Windows systems, and write software. Yet I can't keep a Windows box spyware and virus free, unless that's specifically my objective.
I mean, it's certainly possible, if what you aim for is a spyware free box. Yes, I can use vmware, every virus and spyware scanner, try to make sure everything I install is 100% safe, and perhaps get a clean and hopefully useful box out of it. But no normal user does that, myself included. I'm certainly fairly paranoid and won't install random crap from the net, but nice looking useful tools can have spyware too.
If you want a real example, here's one. Go to this Azureus page. Well, actually that's not the Azureus page. It's a page that some jerks set up where you download spyware. The real page is on SourceForge.
The cost of forgetting to look with a critical eye at the fake page is to have your system infected with all kinds of crap that will then pretty hard to remove. And it's pretty hard, mind you. I could fairly easily have fallen for it, if I hadn't seen the official one before and wondered why they changed their design so much. Normal users don't run strings(1) on suspicious executables and google for information, though.
Now, you could argue that this kind of thing applies to Linux as well. True. However, there's a critical difference: On any sane Linux distribution, the official release of Azureus will be a package. And if the user downloads the software on their own, it'd be installed in their home directory. At least, while running under your account such crap is limited in what it can do, and has it much harder to wedge into your system as to make it hard to remove.