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Kazaa's Australian Assets Frozen
sandstorming writes "Wired is reporting that Sharman Networks (the creators of Kazaa) and Altnet (which licenses technology to Kazaa) have had their assets frozen in the country of Australia. The verdict comes almost four months after the start of the trial prompted by five record company suits. The Australian federal court will convene on March 22nd for final oral submissions, and the verdict is expected several weeks later. Is this the beginning of the end for Kazaa?"
Well, DUH! Just move to the next p2p software. Kazaa was shit anyway.
This is why smart people haven't used Kazaa for years. Try Gnutella or eMule. Google on your own.
Using BitTorrent doesn't make it "harder" for you to get caught than using KaZaa and whatnot. I deal with cease and desist letters involving BitTorrent files all day.
The creators of Kazaa? I think not. They are the current owners of Kazaa maybe, but it seems that a Swedish guy together with two Estonians created the application, while the P2P protocol came from Amsterdam. It was sold to Sharman Networks later on. The Australian software company then messed it up big time - but that is history (it seems).
Source: various articles on Google found by searching for "creators of kazaa".
Why? Pressure from the US. Same reason why non-US isps will take measures against their customers who break US copyright laws. Case in point, a frind of mines who lives in Switzerland got an MPAA form letter for shareing a movie. Now, while the MPAA has no hold there his isp asked him to remove it becuase they were being pressured by the uplinks to the US. It's like this "Oh you DON'T want to stop them? Fine, we are terminating your peering."
Slimy, yup, but thats what kind of pressure the **AA is putting on many companies to have other countries comply with their laws.
That is why Australia and many other countries are taking these measures.
BTW, this isnt a US thing either (i live in the us so it's not anti-american bashing) it's a GREED thing. Laws are being bought in the US left and right to protect these monopolies and megacorps and from recent news it looks like they are buying EU countries with their money and strong arm tactics too.
To my knowledge (and I did a bit of research into this when a friend recommended the program, because I really don't want spyware on my system), Skype was created by the *original* developers of Kazaa, and is NOT IN ANY WAY associated with Sharman Networks, who bought Kazaa from the original developers early in its life. I've had Skype on my system for quite a while and have noticed no spyware, nor has Ad-Aware picked up any from it.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
- Sell DRM-free files direct from the record companies, cheaply because of minimal individual production costs (bandwidth instead of stamping and transporting a CD).
-
Sue everyone still stealing files.
The problem with Bittorrent at the moment, now that eXeem has fixed the centralisation problem (no torrent websites, because they can be shut down), is that it isn't anonymous. You need to know the IP address of other people in the torrent in order to connect to them, so even if the IP address is sent encrypted, the peer it is sent to could be a representative of the copyright-holder (e.g. the MPAA, the RIAA). A solution would be to route communications through an anonymous relay, but this causes a bandwidth problem. What is needed is for everyone (not just on that specific torrent, or indeed on any torrent) to act as anonymous relays. It would slow everything down by half, but would solve the anonymity problem. And bandwidth isn't a problem, or won't be. If someone did develop an anonymous P2P torrent system, then the RIAA and the MPAA wouldn't be able to sue anyone (as in Point 2). But they'd still have to do Point 1 in order to compete. (I wouldn't buy from them if there was no way I could be sued. But some people would.) In the same way, Encyclopædia Brittanica have had to release their content for free on their website and be advertising-supported. If they charge even a penny for it, people simply go to other web-based encyclopedias. Brittanica have to use their brand to get used. And it isn't much on the web compared to Wikipedia. They only get bought as a book by mad librarians who haven't caught up yet, and like to waste paper as libraries. Unfortunately, the represents a whole new phase of the "Tragedy of the Commons", where resources are not scarce (i.e. files can be copied infinitely), and the price mechanism ceases to operate as a throttle. Ultimately, if no one buys from record companies as soon as a track is available on the internet, anonymously and for free, the record companies won't have enough money to produce albums of the high standard we expect. I've been using PeerGuardian2 recently. It's alarming how often I get queried by companies keeping track of P2P users. 30 queries an hour, on various ports (P2P) that I don't use. Use it if you don't want to get sued.