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Court Docs Reveal Kazaa Logging User Downloads
Dan Warne writes "The most explosive documents in the ongoing Kazaa court case have emerged today, including logs of discussions between parent company Sharman and the Estonian developer of the Kazaa Media Desktop. They include extraordinary admissions like: "Reporting will make Kazaa look like spyware, as soon as it becomes evident we record downloads and playbacks, users will flee to competitive networks" and then "One can argue that we have knowledge of copyrighted material being downloaded in our network and have to install filters. If we are reporting [gold] files, then technically we could do the same for every file." Finally, "RIAA [could] collect the IP addresses for everyone who has searched for or downloaded that file." Despite the Kazaa developer's concerns over these issues, Kazaa went ahead with the logging." (More below.)
Warne continues "APC Magazine journalist Garth Montgomery, who has covered every day of the trial in the Australian Federal Court, says: "In a nutshell, this has got to rate as the most explosive document revealed. It makes it damn near impossible to maintain the separation theory that Sharman and Altnet rely on in terms of business independence and technical infrastructure. The control they exercise over the system is complete." Montgomery has also scanned in all the documents and made them available in PDF format, including the confidential Kazaa purchase contract and technical specifications for the Kazaa Media Desktop."
I think stuff like that shows you why closed source software can't be trusted. I bet bigger companies do similar sorts of things as well, as part of their "software updates" and all the other network traffic they generate.
So does this mean that they can get the logs and go after people who have illegal downloaded media?
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Creepy stuff. Not that the logs are all the useful -- considering just how many people and IPs will be in them. That's like getting a list of 5 million people... you can't send them all to jail and/or fine them. Or... can they?
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"Piratebay is hardly private, although I think your response is a bit of a troll-if they were doing that...."
Although no-one is likely to listen I can attest that it would indeed seem Piratebay is doing just what the grandparent of this says. Download a few torrents from them and find out the hard way....
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Is it just KaZaa Media Desktop that is affected by this, or is it done on the server end, thereby logging downloads by ALL clients, such as giFT-Fastrack?
Well, the recording part is the part that's really sad. It's such massive lack of clue, it's... well, come to think of it, probably standard for management.
And wth is with all these companies and collecting data about their users? Everyone must track you, profile you, and make you go through an intrusive registration just to (for example) download a patch to a product you've bought.
Now I _know_ that you're not really anonymous on the Internet, they can collect a ton of data about you, bla, bla, bla, Sure, they _can_. But do they even have a _legitimate_ use for that data? I.e., one that doesn't boil down to "we can sell the list to spammers later."
Most of the collected data nowadays (and again I don't only mean Kazaa) is plain useless for anything even resembling an aggregate statistic.
E.g., in Kazaa's case can they even do an automated aggregate statistic over the filenames? How? There must be hundreds of different ways to write the same filename, so good luck telling whether more people download Britney Spears or Eminem. Or which genre do people download more. And even if (ad absurdum) they could get an aggregate statistic, what would they do with that data?
E.g., in the case of some companies' intrusive registration forms and out-of-hand data collection, wth are they gonna do with such pieces of trivia as my house number or telephone number? _How_ does one use that in an agregate statistic?
I mean, "How many people bought our product in Europe vs USA?" is a statistic. "How many people with an even house number bought our product?" is at most useless trivia. There is _no_ useful information in there.
Dunno, reminds me of dogs chasing a car. They have no idea what they'd do with it if they caught one, but they just must do it anyway.
Sad.
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IF this sort of action was taken at KaZaa what decisions of a similar nature are being taken at Skype?
I know that I use it for personal calls with no inherrent value but there are compaanies who are starting to use it to cut inter-office and employee communications bills - they could very easily be concerned about this.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
I may be mistaken here, but wasn't Skype created by the people who sold Kazaa to Sharman Networks? Sharman's the ones pulling the crap here.. I don't recall (Though I never used Kazaa back then) Kazaa being loaded with Spyware to begin with?
Bottom line, if you want to download stuff illegaly, do it carefully and non-mainstream. One of these days there will be a sensable way to purchase music that you can burn to cd or otherwise do what you like for a fair price. Until that day comes, don't be a moron about it.
Well, don't be a moron then either.
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It looks like bye-bye kazaa.
And really, good riddance. If they're logging all their users' downloads, installing all kinds of adware, spyware, and other crapware on your systems (which they also admitted in court documents), and just generally acting not only as a bad corporate citizen but also an evil software developer in terms of their own users' interests, then this is most definitely not a company we need in existence in the world.
Whether you're for or against P2P in general (I'm for it), the world will be better off with Kazaa completely out of the picture.
If these prove to be legit, and Kazaa has to cough up logs, then the fun is over.
Frankly, Good for them. I never trusted Kazaa one second. There was something about it that I didn't like but could never really pinpoint on what it was outside of spyware infestation. Personally I was a ED2K fan until leeching made the devs put Anti-leeching programming into ED2K. Now all the ED2K clients are so stingy it takes days to get a file started.
I wonder how far back the logs go. With data like that the RIAA/MPAA could have a field day suing users.
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If you want to say that copyright infringment is immoral behavior, you have to make that argument. Not declare the case closed by calling it "stealing" and ridiculing anyone who objects to the metaphor.
Nobody defines it becuause it's brain-dead obvious. The fact you've clouded your own mindset to the point you feel it's not obvious is telling. For instance, taking Doom 3 without paying for it is immoral. A lot of people spent years working on that game to make a living, and you're taking it while not paying for it--that makes it immoral.
It's brain-dead obvious.
These are basic concepts of right and wrong taught when we're three years old. This moral relativism, pro-piracy spiel I sometimes see on Slashdot where "I'm so used to the convenience of downloading that I've justified it in my mind so that I'm not doing anything wrong" is pretty childish. Funny how this attitude disappears when Slashdot posts articles about companies using GPL source code. Not only is it referred to as "stolen" code, but the companies are dumped on for violating the GPL copyright! By your reasoning, why should anybody follow the GPL? What's wrong with breaking it?
This generation of computer users seems to be all about "Gimme that, it's mine! Gimme that, it's mine!" The sense of entitlement is amusing and creates these sorts of hypocritical situations.
Think of electrons in a wire as a pipe full of ping-pong balls glued to each other. The electric company is just pushing and pulling on ping pong balls they have, so that the ping pong balls you have will move.
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