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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"
The Freenet Project is working towards the next major release of the Freenet software, hopefully this side of Christmas. Among the major new features will be:
- Trusted links, so that only your friends will know that you are
part of the network
- Switch from TCP to UDP to support seamless firewall traversal
- Complete code rewrite and simplification
- Support for live broadcast of information, in addition to storage
and retrieval (allowing everything from IRC over Freenet to "instant
RSS")
Freenet's goal is to ensure that people have the freedom to share knowledge without fear that someone is looking over their shoulder. Unlike Kazaa, Freenet is a voluntary, non-profit free software project.The Freenet project requires $2,300 per month to pay for its full time developer, Matthew Toseland, but currently the project's reserves are very low, so if you can spare it (especially given the more immediate drains on people's generosity), your donation would be much appreciated.
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.
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).
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.