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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.
I'm surprised the movie industry doesn't just have them shot and be done with it, it'd be cheaper in the long term and the relative evilness of the act wouldn't impact there current evilness quotient too much.
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In other news, your constitutional freedom of speech has been revoked to prevent crimes such as slander, assault, libel, and copyright infringement.
Australians "risk" jail? Australia was jail!
Now if only they'd jail harmonica players, too.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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.
As such, they want Kazaa masterminds Nikki Hemming and Kevin Bermeister to go to jail term.
Actually, they want no such thing.
From the article:
Counsel for the record industry, Tony Bannon, said his side "didn't want" an imprisonment outcome, but argued that Sharman had failed to comply with the order.
Yes, there is the possiblity of jail time. This goes beyond copyright issues.
Sharman is being accused of contempt. Contempt because they may not have complied with a court order. This case appears to be going to trial. If found in contempt, they could face jail time.
This isn't about copyright anymore. The last judgement against them was about copyright. This is about violating federal law. If they are found to not have complied with a court order, they are in violation of federal law, which is grounds for jail time.
Breaking federal law is not good, and getting caught is worse. Sharman did this to themselves.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
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.
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.
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.
I wonder if the RIAA thought that P2P and music piracy was going to go away once they defeated Napster?
I read an article once that had an interview with a former Napster exec (I don't remember who) on why the RIAA settled with them. It was near the end, and it was obvious that they were going to lose, and they started talking with the recording industry. They pointed out that, hey, there's this new client out there called Gnutella, and guess what - it doesn't have a central server to take down. The RIAA people seemed completely unaware of this, and hadn't even thought about how to deal with such a situation; that's what prompted them to decide to start going after new digital media outlets after ignoring them for so long.
Man on crucifix terrorizes church, demands they eat his flesh and blood. Details at 11.
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.
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.
A libertarian shat on my carpet once. Claimed the free market would sort it out. -Ford Prefect(8777)
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.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
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.