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Kazaa Forced To Modify Search Engine
An anonymous reader writes "Eminem, Madonna and Kylie Minogue are just some of the popular artists whose songs are to be blocked from being illegally distributed on the peer-to-peer network Kazaa following Federal Court orders in Australia yesterday. Sharman Networks, the owner of Kazaa, was ordered by the courts to modify the file-sharing software to block a list of search terms -- primarily artist and song names. The search terms are also to be supplied by record companies. The directive follows the record companies' court victory in September against individuals and organizations associated with Kazaa."
Interesting... it looks like fan-made recordings of their live shows are on Archive.org, apparently by their permission. I can't imagine a major label allowing that...
Let's not overlook certain religious considerations. Madonna Circone was named after the Virgin Mary, who is the central religious symbol of the Christian faith in general, and the Catholic Church in particular. The word 'madonna' is latin-based for 'my lady', and refers to the young woman who, in Christian belief, gave birth to the human form of God about 2000 years ago. In Christian belief, this divine conception of God in a human form was achieved without the natural implantation of sperm into her womb, hence the veneration of the mother of God as a virgin in this faith. The church has always used and continues to use this story to discourage young women of the faith from taking multiple sexual partners and instead focusing her sexuality on a single male husband, thus encouraging family stability as all religions tend to do.
The fact that this pop singer has used her religiously-oriented birth name to obsessively and ironically promote an image of excessive sexual promiscuity in her music and media image has been an essential element of her career success, especially in countries of primarily Catholic populations. Now her 'owners' of her 'product' wish to restrict access to her recordings and media image by making it illegal for her fans to access her image and recordings without the payment of a sum of their choosing for this privledge.
However there is the question of whether the RIAA or their funding sources have or even should have the right to actually restrict or control any media access to the name of the Madonna. By what right does this organization have to believe that they can restrict public access to the name of the mother of God? The RIAA company who 'owns' the 'right' to the name 'Madonna' should reconsider this action, lest they run the risk of pissing off one billion Christians by claiming that they have some bizarre legal right to the name of the Madonna regardless of the form or circumstances that they have come to assume that they have this 'right'.