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Australian Court says Kazaa Users Breach Copyright
mferrare writes "This from Reuters UK: An Australian court ruled on Monday that users of Kazaa, a popular internet music file-swapping system, breached music copyright and ordered its owners to modify the software. The music industry told the court that Sharman Network licensed users to access a network it knew was being used for piracy and hence it was authorising people to infringe copyright"
who's still using kazaa anyway? it's full of adawares and spywares
Check out aussie journalist Garth Montgomery's full coverage "kazaagate" site here
Including the full official court ruling as well
No I dont know him, but have found the site very insightful throughout the trial.
Freenet is slow. And i am not talking about the developemnt cycle (if you are on the unstable branche you would think it goes very fast). I am talking about the download speed.
,an open source client without any spyware, that does provide search (where is the search button in freenet?)
That is because the freenet was developed for anonymisation, not for file exchange. That is, freenet is good against compagnies that sue their own customers.
If you want to leave kazaa because it future is doomed because their next client will/should contain copyright restrictions (I am sure there wil be lots of trolls here that say you can not determine this, true, but flaimbait) you might want to switch to emule
If you live in fear because ou think some compagny might sue you because of copyright violations please use freenet. But you might get afraid they capture you for aiding terrorist/childporn. Don't worrie you will never get such charges get uphold by a court, (if you get there).
Every day, fewer and fewer customers enter my store to buy fewer and fewer CDs. Why is no one buying CDs? Are people not interested in music? Do people prefer to watch TV, see films, read books? I don't know. But there is one, inescapable truth - Internet piracy is mostly to blame.
I'm afraid this isn't obvious to me. I never buy CDs from record stores; I buy them on the internet, often second hand. It is cheaper, easier (order from your house, and they deliver), and I don't like browsing in shops. People are still buying music, legally, just not from you. They buy on the internet, either CDs or downloads (e.g. iTunes Music Store).
I call BS! I remember a while back Slashdot posted a similar story on piracy and you just a copied a comment from that word for word.
The story wasn't funny then, it isn't funny now.
Welcome to Australia. We don't even have the legal right to tape shows off tv. Rather than challenge rediculous things like that, it's the way of the Australian legal community to just ignore the problem.
How we know is more important than what we know.
That's obviously wrong because the Donkey network has a larger userbase than Kazaa. The inherent reason that anonymous P2P must be slow is because to make it anonymous there's heavy use of proxying, and because of this you are not only downloading the stuff you want, but also relaying unrelated data to other people.
FYI: This is a cut & paste troll that gets posted in every P2P/piracy related article.
The **aa already has fake donkey servers in the cloud. They're collecting evidence as I type this.
http://blocklist.org/ is a nice place to find blocklists for emule/edonkey and a heap of other things too. Yes, emule supports these. The servers mentioned will send a chill down your spine. (Sonny Boy !!) Have a look at the list.
And people on Freenet do not swap material which is under copyright?
What's wrong with swapping material which is under copyright? I've had a BitTorrent client open all week, with my upload speed pretty much maxxed out. I've been distributing copyrighted material with it. And I haven't broken a single law. Because - get this - the stuff I'm distributing is stuff I either own or have permission to distribute.
You're an idiot if you listen to the RIAA/MPAA's lies about how "distributing copyright material is illegal". It's only illegal if you don't have permission. The RIAA want you to think that copyright is a "special" thing that only "artists" get, and you - the consumer - must fear, like an ancient pagan cringing before the idol of his god. But that's bullshit.
Copyright is a simple concept that naturally applies to any creative endeavour. Including anything you or I create. And if you or I create something, and we want to distribute it over the Internet, then it makes sense to use P2P networks. At which point we are using P2P to distribute copyright material - and yet we are not breaking any laws.
Don't listen to the RIAA/MPAA's lies. Copyright != illegal to distribute. Copyright == illegal to distribute without permission. Two little words that make a world of difference.
Freenet is just another P2P application, and since people have nothing to share except other peoples material, it will be used to do just that.
Maybe that applies to some people. Like you, I assume - you wouldn't say a thing like that unless it applied to you. But some of us create things ourselves, you know? And having done that, miraculously we have things to share that are our own. And we use P2P to share them.
If you walk into a store and steal anything, you get arrested (some call this bad luck!), and you will get some punishments. What is different here?
The difference is that theft is always illegal. Whereas sharing copyright material is only illegal if you are also infringing the copyright in that material. Which can easily be avoided by either creating the material yourself, or getting the permission of the copyright holder to distribute it - at which point (am I repeating myself here?) you can share it over a P2P network without breaking any laws.
It is not your digital right to exchange copyrighted material at all.
Whoa, you're saying I don't have the right to use the computer I own Internet connection I leased to transfer the material I created?
Fuck that. I'll thank you not to tell me to throw away my right to freedom of speech, if that's quite okay with you. It is my freedom that's on the line if P2P networks ever actually get made illegal, and I do care about my freedom.
Go after the people who are infringing copyrights, please. And leave those of us alone who are distributing copyright material entirely legally, because we own the fucking copyrights.
And have done. I was involved with the people who managed to push through the 1999 Copyright Amendment (Computer Programs) Act which makes it legal to reverse engineer software for interoperability, security analysis, to correct errors or just to learn how it works. It took the support of a dedicated team of lawyers and academics but, frankly, the law got changed simply because the people who were voting on it didn't really understand what we were asking for and didn't see the harm in giving it to us. Which really boils down to the lobbyists of proprietary software (like the BSA) not being nearly as organised as the lobbyists of the music industry.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I think the legal term that applies to that line of reasoning is "substantial non-infringing uses." For instance, knives can be used to kill people by stabbing, but they are used much more often in cooking, so they are legal. Bullets can be used to kill people by shooting, but are used far more often in target shooting and hunting, so they are legal. Nuclear bombs always (ok, almost always) are used to kill people, so they are illegal.
All right, a little over the top, but I hope you see my point. No reasonable critic of Kazaa has argued that it never ever has legal uses. The argument generally goes along the lines that the vast majority of traffic is of a copyright-infringing or otherwise illegal nature.
If the balance tipped so that (beware: made up numbers ahead) 95% of traffic was completely legal because, for instance, the copyright owner placed the works in the public domain, but 5% was infringing, it would be hard to make the argument to destroy Kazaa (although people would certainly try, as they do with every technology).
Now, does any reasonable person doubt in their gut that the majority of megabytes the information transferred on Kazaa is copyrighted and distribution is happening with explicit permission of the copyright owner? I was a heavy Napster user before the courts ruled it illegal, and I remember the "but there are legal uses of Napster" arguments to... but I remember exactly how much of each kind of material was available.
The way to save Kazaa is to somehow 1) raise the amount of legal transfers and 2) lower the amount of illegal transfers. Anything else is arguing legal technicalities. I have no idea how to do either one, but I'm sure someone smarter than me will.
Sarcasm and hyperbole are the final refuges for weak minds
The first time this story was posted, I thought, "This guy needs to see a counsellor."
f aces+ruin.+CD+sales+have+dropped+through+the+floor .%22&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2004-22,GGLD :en&filter=0
The second time I saw this story, I thought, "Umm, you already said that."
The third time I wondered what the hell is going on. Then I tried a google search and looky what I found.
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=%22My+business+
And thats not even half the time the story has been posted. It does the rounds on slashdot quite regularly. It should be added to slashot posting spam filters or something. Great work of fiction, isn't it?
Um, try not take that post seriously.
1/ It is not about you stealing one object and preventing somebody else by owning that object. What you mention is production/distribution cost. The distribution cost is neglectable in case of digital distribution over P2P networks. The production cost however still exist, so a fee is in order.
2/ Go live in a communist country, and you are probably right. Somehow the world is a bit more selfish=kapitalism. People want money for their work, more money then what might be reasonably expected.
3/ You return the book after reading it. You do not have continuing profit from having borrowed this book. If you made a copy of the book (analog or digital), you would have a profit. Hense the name copyright.
If a music file could only be used by one person, the license or ownership of that file should be transferable from one person to another, you could even borrow it for a period of time. Since this is not the case, you are really making a copy, both having profit from it. That is why they call it copyright. Fair use is a totally other case, which might be the case with your book.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
This is just...amazing. I think next, we should sue car companies who pay to have their cars featured in movies where the cars are used to commit crimes (speeding, drive bys, etc).
Not a perfect analogy but its very akin. Kazaa said "you can find millions of files on our product." That is 100% true. It is also NOT hard to find millions of perfectly legal files on the Kazaa network.
This is just like my school, which has their distro of Red Hat hard coded to NOT play MP3s. XMMS is included but it will literally NOT PLAY MP3s. Their reasoning: they're a vehicle for piracy. Anyone remember when they were saying hte same about CD burners? How about VCRs? How about tapes?
This just gets dumber and dumber the farther things go. It's almost like they're saying that the company should not say you can find any type of file on their product (then why would people want it?), but I'm sure they'd find something wrong anyway.
Bomb the RIAA and MPAA. They want to make an example of Kazaa, I want to make an example of them.
Winamp was play "Anakin vs Obi-Wan" from my Star Wars Episode III soundtrack CD.
First claiming that Kazaa users are breaching copyright, what's next? Using Winamp to play cartel based CDs instead of the 'media browser' launched by the CD violates the DMCA?
Dark times indeed