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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."
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)?
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.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
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.I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
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.
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