Kazaa Outed Over 'Trust Fund' for Red Cross

danwarne writes "In one of the most bizarre twists in the court action against Kazaa yet, documents have been tendered in Australian Federal Court court that showed that Kazaa claimed to have set up a trust fund for donations to the Red Cross (at about the time the tsunami hit), but the Red Cross has confirmed in writing it has never heard from them about it. The music industry alleged in court that it was a tactic by Kazaa parent company Sharman Networks to park money out of the reach of the music industry if it loses the case and is left with a huge damages bill. This in the same week that it came out in court that top Sharman/BDE execs offloaded their multi-million dollar homes. Sounds like Kazaa's lawyers might be telling them to prepare for the worst..."

Comments

Hurray!

[sgant]

The RIAA is about to shut down another service that no one uses anymore! Way to go!

Glad to see them wasting their money by pissing it away like this. The people that download music/movies will always be about 10 steps ahead of them.

Journalism

[kureido]

The Red Cross wouldn't lie. Certainly my-main-man at the Cross, Jean-Jacques, was nothing but totally upfront during our interview. And I've interviewed plenty of spivs. My spivometre didn't move a nanometre while I was talking to him. Jean-Jacques was a straight up bro.

What in the holy name of hell is passing for journalism these days? I might as well be reading my little brother's blog.

p2p not synonymous w/ kazaa

[dirvish]

Those wankers at Kazaa have hurt the p2p cause quite a bit. They knew they were doing shady stuff (adware, etc.) and now they are rightfully paying the price. For every step that people like the EFF make to make government realize it shouldn't over-regulate technology, shysters like Kazaa force things a step back to make a quick buck.

Privatized Court of Public Opinion

[Doc Ruby]

We know that none of these sleazy biz tactics have anything to do with their liability for abuse of their software by some users. I bet these stories are being promoted by the music biz to cover up a Supreme Court decision against Kazaa/Grokster/Morpheus this month, which won't have a legal basis, but is rather just a favor to corporate media which hates P2P. The rest of the corporate media, in the "news" business, will be able to report that the Supremes dealt the "sleazy" P2P corps the justice they deserve, because they run tsunami scams. It will all make sense in the "news", though it won't have any legal merit.

Re:Privatized Court of Public Opinion

[Doc Ruby]

It doesn't matter how sleazy they are, when deciding their liability for the actions of users, as being argued in the Supreme Court this month. Even the basest criminals have the rights to exercise their legitimate actions free from liability. It doesn't matter how righteous they are, what their business model is, whether they eat babies in their office - when judging their right to distribute software that is sometimes abused by some of its users. Unless you're so distracted by their other reported abuses, that you've totally ignored that I'm talking about their Supreme Court case deciding only that software liability, you're demonstrating exactly what I'm talking about.

Re:Not suprised...

[Doc Ruby]

Actually, it's more like in the 1980s, when a very high percentage of pager users were drug dealers; a very high percentage of pages were illegal drug transactions. Were the telcos liable for filtering those pages?

Not so

[Nik13]

You make it sound like they're only attacking networks/means that nobody uses anymore, but they've done quite a lot of damage to BitTorrent and eDonkey/eMule "communities" too. I wouldn't exactly say that nobody uses those anymore. Granted, they haven't shut down those 2 yet, but it's not like they aren't trying or not doing anything about them either. (Mind you I'm quite happy to see this crapzaa plague go away)

Re:Not so

[sgant]

They won't shut down BitTorrent. They can't shut something down unless it's a central entity.

I mean, they could try to go after the original programmer of Bittorrent or something, though the source out in the world protected by the MIT licence...so the RIAA would also have to challenge that if they want to "shut it down".

They close a tracker site down, 10 more pop up. Bittorrent isn't going anywhere and in fact will become better and better.

The RIAA are fighting a losing battle...do they have a right to fight it, sure. But I still belive they should instead try to find a better solution then what they're attempting, because as you can see, it doesn't really stop anyone from trading music. They shut down Napster, people still trade, they shut down Kaaza people still trade. In fact, I'm willing to bet that more people trade music today then they EVER did when Napster was around. I have no facts to back that up, it's just a hunch.

Of course, I could be totally wrong.

Re:Not so

[m50d]

They weren't open source is why they went under. Gnutella is still out there and going strong while other networks from the same era are collapsing, because the source is available. Napster and Kazaa both got in trouble when they started filtering things, because that showed they could have filtered out copyright infringing stuff. That can't happen with bittorrent, because the software is open source and there is no central server.

Re:Not suprised...

[mark-t]

The reason why there were no penalties for it before is that until fairly recently, the potential for noncommercial copyright infringement to actually make an impact in the total number of copies out there was virtually nonexistant, and simply not worth the time to pursue. Outside of a few fringe warez BBS's, the most common form of piracy was via sneakernet, where people would physically exchange disks. Ever-improving internetworking technology in the hands of the consumer, however, has made very large scale copy distribution increasingly available to them at virtually no cost at all, presenting an ever-growing threat to what Copyright actually is supposed to be. Copyright holders, and the agents that represent them, are compelled to act (ie, press charges) against infringers in response to the technological changes in order to preserve the value of Copyright.

Unfortunately, a return to the state Copyright was in before 1996 would also necessitate a return to a time where the Internet wasn't what it is now either. Since the latter isn't possible, neither is the former.

Sorry.