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

ObLinus

[SinaSa]

"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."

Real men don't scam citizens for stash-money! They zip it up, call it goat porn and upload it to Kazaa! Oh wait...

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.

Re:Hurray!

[Olix]

(Olix uses knowledge gained in GCSE buisness lessons) does Kazza actually have money then? Where do they earn it from? I would have thought, if the company is private limited, then they would just declare the comapny bankrupt and start again...

Re:Hurray!

[m50d]

They earn it from all the bundled spyware. So they do have quite a bit, and the RIAA will get as much of it as they can. But the execs are probably safe, yes.

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.

Re:Journalism

[h4rm0ny]

Seconded! Who approved this piece of crap! I quote from the beginning of the article:

them on attracting the world's most downloaded program in history as a contributor to its coffers. With three billion files downloaded each month on Kazaa, the Red Cross could almost rebuild Asia single-handedly from what must be a generous pool of dollars from Sharman

Most downloaded program in the world? Rebuild Asia singe-handedly? This isn't hyperbole, this pure Improbability-Drive-A-Bole! The editor only needed to read three short paragraphs in to reach this rubbish! So either no-one read the article, or else they didn't understand what they were reading.
My two pence!

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.

Re:Upsides?

[BackInIraq]

First rule of Soulseek:

Never, ever talk about Soulseek.

Not suprised...

[ImaLamer]

Considering this company makes money off of bootlegging and piracy it makes sense.

But before you fly off the handle, look at it this way: They took software for trading files and turned it and it's abilities into a profit machine, stooping so far as to load users with spyware to further that profit (remember: Kazaa Lite has no connection to Sharman). All the time we all knew that Kazaa was used 99% of the time for retrieving copyrighted works people had no rights to. This isn't Bittorrent where many files are free.

After they had cashflow they had one of two responsiblities: Either filter owned works or pay up for those works. They made information trade their business and they didn't own the information they were "brokering".

I don't know how people can be suprised or offended when Kazaa or Napster gets sued. I don't work for the **AA, and am not Dr. Dre, just not suprised at this. I'm not suprised if they get there asses handed to them. (I'm not counting on them getting off on any technicalities, I'm just saying they have it coming.)

Napster and Kazaa with websites is tantamount to a drug dealer on the corner with a sign and them turning a profit is as disgusting as it gets. I've bootleged and pirated quite a few things but I nor anyone else should be making money off of that.

That is the point isn't it?

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?

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.

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.

I call bullshit on this story

[ArsenneLupin]

Timing is wrong. How do you compare this:

The timing of the news coincided with the devastating tsunami and the global charity needed all it could get at its greatest time of need.

... and ...:

At the time, Dispatch thought that Red Cross spokesman Jean-Jacques Bovay might have needed more time, just to check and be on the safe side before finally declaring Who the hell is this Sharman of which you speak. It was Christmas Eve that we phoned him, afterall.

So, if I got this right, Dispatch phoned the Red Cross two days before the catastrophe occurred for which the alleged trust fund was set up? What the hell. I smell a rat here.

Re:I call bullshit on this story

[shark72]

The timing is sadly coincidental, but not wrong. Kazaa was pulling their hijinks with the Red Cross before Christmas; you can read the dispatch from Christmas eve which covered it at the time.

Yeah, the tsunami happened a few days later. Yes, it was sad, and yes, the Red Cross stepped in to help. But that was a coincidence -- Kazaa could not have known that this would happen. The portion you quoted uses the word "coincided" which is another form of "coincidence." And, sometimes coincidences happen.

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.

Shady folks

[SteelV]

I was on the phone with a Kazaa-exec a few years back (actually, listening in), and couldn't help commenting on the rampant spyware issues. He was not actually at Kazaa, rather at a company that managed their ad-services if I remember correctly, and took a great deal of offense at my comments! He got really upset when I mentioned how Kazaa-Lite was so much better (hehehe).

He sounded fairly unscrupulous at the time, so I guess he knew what was going on fairly well and was OK with it. This seems like a continuation of past policy. Obviously the higher-ups don't care about users, just about making as much money as they can, any way they can.

I thought it would completely die years ago (I stopped using it a long time back). Maybe it will soon with all these recent "issues."

New take on the Nigerian scam letter...

[michaeldot]

Dear Sir,

I am an extremely wealthy Australian businessman who needs to quickly move money out of the country.

If you let me use your bank account, I will pay you 10%.

Of course, I do already know your bank account details, given the amount of spyware I loaded onto your computer...

Sincerely,

N. Hemming
Sharman Networks