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Kazaa Owners Risk Jail
An anonymous reader writes "There's been a twist in the Sharman Networks vs record labels case in Australia. Lawyers for the music industry now claim that Sharman's attempt to block Australian IP addresses from accessing the Kazaa website doesn't comply with a court order. As such, they want Kazaa masterminds Nikki Hemming and Kevin Bermeister to go to jail term. The saga began in Feb 2004 and ZDNet Australia has a complete timeline."
They should have made Kazaa ownership much like their softwares ideology, P2P.
I'd like to see Australia try to jail that many people.
Time to put the CEO of Xerox in jail too, I guess. Oh, and Sony, for their VCRs. And DVD-RW drives. And Microsoft, because Kazaa runs on Windows. Oh, and the Intel CEO too, because Windows runs on Intel processors. And don't forget Maxtor's CEO, because the files are written to a hard drive.
What happened to putting the actual people who commit crimes in prison? Oh, wait, it's much easier to target the gun maker...
So when will Sony be going to jail for their root kit issue? Funny how there not facing criminal charges when what they did was so worse. Add in the fact they still have not taken responsibility for what they did.
In other news, your constitutional freedom of speech has been revoked to prevent crimes such as slander, assault, libel, and copyright infringement.
It looks as though record labels will keep fighting against change until it's too late for them to change themselves.
They've ultimatly dug their own hole. Instead of embracing a viable e-business model early in the game they instead went after a very small segment of the population that was taking music via napster and the like. During this time they were writing up their "victories" in the hopes of beating back the tide of geeks sharing 2 Live Crew albums. Instead of fending off the geeks they got Joe Sixpack interested in his own form of music theft. And here we are today; the music industry is trying to embrace the internet to the tune of 99 cents a song but Joe already has an easier and cheaper solution.
I wonder if the RIAA thought that P2P and music piracy was going to go away once they defeated Napster? They would have been better off leaving Napster alone and spending the resources on serious developement of technology to keep their media on a paying basis.
But it's like they say; hind sight is 20-20. I'll drink to that.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
So the courts want the Kazaa folks "to modify the software to ensure 3,000 keywords would be filtered by 5 December." The hitch is that existing copies wouldn't filter stuff, presumably - the nature of P2P makes that impossible.
I don't see what the big deal is: the owners did all they could to take Kazaa out of Australia altogether. Even if they made a modified version of the program for Australians - which I think would be less of a drastic change than denying downloads altogether - the fact remanins that the original version of the program will be floating around on the Internet and that plenty of people already have it. You can't filter those people's programs, and who's going to knowingly download a crippled verion of Kazaa? And deleting or disasbling existing copies of the program is similarly impossible.
So if you knowingly set up a network that you can't take down, what happens when it's deemed illegal and you say, "Hey, my hands are tied"? Is anyone to blame there? The users? The creators? Justin Frankel (who first dreamed up the Gnutella protocol that Kazaa is based on)? This is a really messy issue, and I don't think that the judge fully understands what the record companies are asking for.
I produce electronic music and write little games. Have a look.
So this small guy, Kazaa, has to take responsibility of its software, but large companies like Sony don't need to take responsibility of their software. Thats a thinker.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
Nice to see someone else with the intelligence to see how the record labels dropped the ball. There are not nearly enough comments such as this one when it comes to this topic. The pop-explosion would have been ten fold if they had marketed the product properly (as would the new pop-punk explosion). Think of all the burnt CDs that are/were kicking around that revenue could have been earned on...I'd hate to guess how much it would be.
More than that, the RIAA started suing in different countries at different times. It hasn't happened at all in China, where filesharing is extremely popular. Face it, free easily-available music and movies is a model with no viable competition. The threat of legal problems or ramping up the difficulty of bootlegging is the only way to compete.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Any process with a positive growth coefficient grows exponentially until something starts to limit its growth. Consider the process of procecuting P2P. What does it cost? Who makes money from it? Of COURSE lawyers are going to scream about procecuting P2P. Its they way they make money! Whether or not its (P2P or prosecution) good for the music industry is an entirely different question.
I think the Austrialians need to go after those guys who invented File Transfer Protocal, more files have been shared that way than any other peer to peer software ever written. :-P
Whether of not you consider P2P a good or bad thing, have no illusions. The people that made all of these programs are, at their heart, businessmen that simply want to profit.
I can name quite a few P2P software developers who would strongly disagree with your broad-stroke stereotyping on that front. For example, of the Gnutella clients listed on Wikipedia:
Acquisition, Acqlite, Apollon, BearShare, Cabos, CocoGnut, DM2, FrostWire, giFT, Gnucleus, Gtk-gnutella, iMesh, KCeasy, Kiwi Alpha, LimeWire, MLdonkey, Morpheus, Mutella, Phex, Poisoned, Qtella, Shareaza, Swapper.NET, Symella, XFactor, XNap, and XoloX:
Only 6 of 27 are closed source, while 18 of 27 are outright GPLed. The vast majority are both freeware and un-spywared/ad containing.
Man on crucifix terrorizes church, demands they eat his flesh and blood. Details at 11.
Obviously you are suiting history to fit your propoganda. The idea that Joe Six-Pack started filesharing copywrited files after the RIAA made news by suing these people is, well, not at all the truth. You know it, and everybody here knows it.
Uh, no, I don't know it and I've seen no evidence of this. The number of Joe Sixpacks who came to me and asked "what is napster and how do I use it", after the Metallica headlines, is astounding. Do you think Joe learned of Napster off of Slashdot? That's what I know. That's my experience. I don't know where you thought you had any insight into what I or anyone else knows but I'd say you're dead wrong.
Face it, free easily-available music and movies is a model with no viable competition.
If you'd take the pains to read my post you'd see that I said the same thing. So what's there to face? My possition was that if there was a model introduced early (before Joe Sixpacks p2p fetish) the RIAA would not have these issues today. If your concept was completely true there would be no iTunes today.
The threat of legal problems or ramping up the difficulty of bootlegging is the only way to compete.
I'd guess there tons more p2p users today than there was before the Napster lawsuits. Still some have gone the legal path and use services such as iTunes. Are these the same people that used Napster? Some doubtlessly but I think some people got into the concept from their iPods. Give me one good reason the RIAA couldn't have made an iTunes model years ago and coupled with mp3 hardware manufacturers such as Rio or Archos? Had they had done this Joe would have bought into it. Instead Joe's first venture into "internet music" was Napster and that hosed the RIAA.
Just take a look at Comcast and Dish Network and see how they beat out TV show piraracy with the help of TiVo. It's a fantastic model and while TV piracy still exists in large amounts the bottom line is that they understood that the same broadband service they were providing with cable could help doom their TV programming. So what do they do? They cut to the quick and make TV piracy seem childish in the face of paying 10 bucks a month for their own legal form of shows on demand.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I am sure most slashdotters own stock. And accept the fact that not all slashdotters are of the same opinion. You are also a slashdotter.
The worst thing that can happen to copyright -- is it being enforced.
If 30% of the US's population gets huge fines and jailtime for their copyright infringements and/or DMCA violations.
If 90% of Israel's population gets jailtime for their copyright infringements.
If similar numbers occur in various countries around the world...
Copyright will be abolished.