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."

Comments

Re:It's their own fault

[JonN]

Um, for them it shouldn't be that hard. "Britain decided to use its new outpost as a penal colony; the First Fleet of 11 ships carried about 1500 people--half of them convicts. The fleet arrived in Sydney Harbour on 26 January 1788, and it is on this day every year that Australia Day is celebrated." Right from the Australian Foreign Affairs website

Re:Elimination

[grumpyman]

Guys, I'd wonder what are the ramifications if a company or organization actually murder a person? The chief executive goes to jail and that's it (like mafia)?

Good

[Verteiron]

They've got it coming and I don't really care about the P2P issues. A couple of years ago, it seemed like every other computer I worked on was in my shop solely due to the spyware installed by Kazaa. An otherwise clean computer that had Kazaa installed on it became unusuable within a matter of days due to the sheer volume of popups, RAM-hogging spyware/junkware and all the other crap that Kazaa installed as a matter of course. Uninstalling Kazaa left behind all the junkware. Uninstalling the junkware left behind reinstall tricklers and more often than not would break Winsock completely. Kazaa was the first software to install really damaging spyware automatically; they certainly opened the door for lots of other software to do the same once Sharman proved it was a viable business model. If for no other reason, these yoyos should go to jail for intentionally deceiving hundreds of thousands of users without the slightest regard for their time and money.

Hypocrites

[Anonymous Coward]

We all know what kind of stink this places gets into as soon as the **AA targets individual downloaders. Make up your mind. The same thing was true when they went after Napster, you all said that they should target the copyright infringers. They did. You changed your mind again.

I for one am glad that Slashdotters are too poor to own stock. Capitalism works!

Archie

[RedLaggedTeut]

I think the Austrialians need to go after those guys who invented File Transfer Protocal..

You are trying to be funny, but the US music industry really did try to shut down ftp (successfully) by taking down the Archie index servers. The funny thing is, at the time I wasn't even aware that ftp could be used en masse for distributing music without a license; the Archie index servers were useful in general. This means the music industry will have no remorse to take the entire internet down with them if they expect to maintain their profit margins. You may not even remember Archie because it was killed by the music industry.

Re:No light at the end of the tunnel

[capnchicken]

Bullshit,

There was a very small segmant of the population that knew about Napster, before Metalica stepped in and made it headline news. That was where they could've nipped it in the bud and realized right then and there that the jig was up and everyone knew how much their widely available, non-tangible, forced scarcity media was really worth in economic terms.

If there was a legal way to download songs at a nickle or 50 cents (a dollar is still too much for a song to me) back then, then the societal acceptance of free downloads would have never come into play. And people would associate it more with shop lifting.

Also how (not to be snoody, really asking this) does the Recording Industry Association of AMERICA have any say in Chineese law.

One more thing, if these guys hadn't tried to shut down K++ lite, then maybe I would feel some pity for them, but it's clear all Sharmen wanted out of this was a way to make a lot of money off with a tool designed to rip off of other people's copyrights while enforcing their own like it means more than everybody else's. Fuck them.

No. Not Good

[Crash Culligan]

They've got it coming and I don't really care about the P2P issues.

That's unfortunate, because if they do get prosecuted and jailed over anything, the record companies doing the prosecuting are not going to be crowing about jailing a spyware manufacturer. They'll be celebrating the jailing of the developers of a peer-to-peer software client that we both know has non-infringing uses.

And the message they're sending out won't be that "spyware is bad," it'll be that "file sharing is bad." (Optionally insert a ", mmmmmkay?" after each for the full effect.) Between the two, which do you really think will be chilled if this prosecution goes through?

As fallacious as the whole "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" meme may be, this may be an occasion to let it slide. Should they be jailed? Probably, but let it at least be for the right reason, and let it send the right message.