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Kazaa To Return As a Legal Subscription Service

Posted by Soulskill on from the if-it's-good-enough-for-the-pirate-bay dept.

suraj.sun sends in this excerpt from CNet: "One of the most recognizable brands in the history of illegal downloading is due to officially resurface, perhaps as early as next week, sources close to the company told CNET News. Only this time the name Kazaa will be part of a legal music service. Altnet and parent company Brilliant Digital Entertainment attached the Kazaa brand to a subscription service that will offer songs and ringtones from all four of the major recording companies. For the past few months, a beta version has been available. The company tried recently to ratchet up expectations with a series of vague, and what some considered misguided, press releases. The site will open with over 1 million tracks." The NYTimes has a related story about how the music industry is trying to convert casual pirates by offering more convenient new services.

2 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Amazon.com by thetoadwarrior · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've just been buying music from Amazon. It's DRM-free, good quality and the pricing is generally just right. If they want to stop piracy just make everything available to everyone in this sort of format.

    This whole idea of things being available in certain territories is outdated and makes no sense on the internet but as long as it's around then people will just steal what they can't buy.

  2. Only the searches are onion-routed by tepples · · Score: 3, Interesting

    When will they get around to fighting the completely decentralised and encrypted services bound together by nothing more than a loose collection of opensource tools?

    For performance reasons, only the searches are onion-routed in popular peer-to-peer file sharing networks; the downloads are direct from someone who has a piece of the file. So when you download a multi-gigabyte Blu-ray Disc rip, the machine on which it is shared still has to reveal its IP address. A copyright owner could log on to one of these services, download a piece of the work, and get an IP address, a time, and a block of the file: evidence that a piece of the copyrighted work has been distributed. Then the copyright owner can get a judge to compel the owner of a netblock to find the customer whose Internet access was used to distribute copies without authorization.

    Or would you onion-route the downloads too? Let me know when Tor has become efficient enough to run BitTorrent or eMule Kad Network over it.