Kazaa Forced To Modify Search Engine

An anonymous reader writes "Eminem, Madonna and Kylie Minogue are just some of the popular artists whose songs are to be blocked from being illegally distributed on the peer-to-peer network Kazaa following Federal Court orders in Australia yesterday. Sharman Networks, the owner of Kazaa, was ordered by the courts to modify the file-sharing software to block a list of search terms -- primarily artist and song names. The search terms are also to be supplied by record companies. The directive follows the record companies' court victory in September against individuals and organizations associated with Kazaa."

Methinks

That Erminem and Mardonna are the new hot searches on the Kaaza network

what next?

Perhaps the banning of the keyword phrase `fuck the riaa`? In case they haven't noticed, there are so many fakes on there anyway that a name isnt an accurate guarantee of what a file contains. But of course this matters not so long as the RIAA can line their pockers with consumers' money.

Re:what next?

There are so many fakes because the RIAA has been happily hiring companies to pollute the search results for certain terms.

They filed this lawsuit so they could cut some annual spending. /tongue in cheek

The court has ordered Sharman to release a new version of Kazaa by 5 December that includes a non-optional keyword filter, restricting users' ability to illegally access and swap copyright music.

Unless Kazaa rolls out a change to the fast track network as well... why the f*** would anyone update their client? Some of the people using such software may not be to brightest lightbulbs in the house, but everyone is going to know this update will break certain functionality.

Re:what next?

There are so many fakes because the RIAA has been happily hiring companies to pollute the search results for certain terms.

Actually, I doubt the fakes can be much worse than the originals. Call me a troll, but blocking access to Eminem, Madonna and Kylie Minogue's songs is a step towards improving the quality of music.

Control

Like you said, it's about lining their pockets. One method : Deliberately add words to the list that end up with independant artists (who might release their music on Kazaa themselves) getting blocked.

Prevent your competition from getting exposure = preventing them from becoming 'real' competition.

Me? Paranoid? naaaaaaa.

Re:Control

Example:

My favorite band (And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead) has an LP named Madonna. While I believe they're on a major label now, and I don't know their stance on filesharing, anyone who wants to check out that CD can't, especially since they're sure as hell not gonna play it on the radio. (By the way, check them out. They're not death metal, despite their name.)

Same legal battle

Is this the same legal battle thats been going on for the last few years? Or is this a completely new one?

Bring on the l337 speak!

or Pig Latin, etc... when will they learn?

And remember the DMCA

rot13, l33t, pig-latin, backward spelled....

all these are methods used to *crypt* the filename.
under the DMCA it *IS COMPLETLY ILLEGAL* to the ??AA to try to circumvent them.
If they try to add "3m1n3m", "adona-may", or "brit. sraeps" to the list, they're breaking an encryption scheme and that's illegal for them !!!

Eh?

Apart from the obvious slashdot also has this technology in place:
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

I thought kazaa was long dead and buried and reduced to nothingness.

I know noone who uses it anymore, its all BT and eDonkey type stuff.

Another obvious thought here, could I supply my own list of copyrighted files and make sure they aren't searchable, my company has copyrighted files which should be protectable, wheres the web interface to do it?

Or is this another anal raping by the music industry just to get their own way?

Call me stupid, but?

Who still uses Kazaa?
From the newbie people I've helped with their pc's, I've only seen 1 with kazaa still installed.

Most of them have moved on to other "better" methods of downloading their music/etc.

Does Kazaa still have spyware btw?

Problem with generics...

I highly doubt Kylie Minogue is the only Kylie out there with recorded material, for example. Blocking specific artist+album+song combinations might be reasonable, but there's a lot of room for false positives.

In time, even more absurd terms may become blocked... eg, The [wikipedia.org].

This will block legal file transfers

Here is an example of one of the song names that was a part of the complaint against kazaa "Yellow". This basicly means anyone searching for "yellow something" is going to have their download blocked.

kazaa is dead long live p2p.

You can always use eMule [emule-project.net] (win32) / amule [amule.org] (linux/max/e.a.) Shareaza (win32) or limewire [limewire.com] (win/max/javathingy) to perform those searches for you.

The music labels got to realize if they push the p2p networks too hard the p2p clients will go underground [sourceforge.net] into anonymous [gnunet.org] networks [eff.org]

Kazaa history

So they started out in Europe, and only moved to Australia/Vanuatu because of RIAA pressure. Why don't they just sell the assets to a Vanuatu company and move the whole thing offshore?

Are the new guys, operating out of Australia/Vanuatu, somehow more legit than the guys who ran it before?

I thought the Kazaa guys were the sort to do "anything to win", including fairly Talmudic stuff like what they've already done (splitting the ads from the network itself, so that they can claim that they aren't really able to know about or stop infringing).

Let the syntax war begin!

So what are the standard rewritting rules to evade dumb pattern matching ? Writing backward ? L33tsp33k ? doubling characters ? Cockney Rhyming Slang ? [wikipedia.org]

The W3C should set up a list of standardized procedure.

Arrogance of the RIAA

Yet again, we have the RIAA showing their complete ignorance of technology, and applying bullish tactics that will only succeed in irritating.

10,000 words list? I can pretty much bet that most of these will be very general i.e. 'Kylie' instead of 'Kylie Minogue', so any artist named Kylie who want to bypass the grabing hands of the record industry and distribute themselves will now have a much harder time.

It is absolutely crazy how this can happen. RIAA get a levy on blank media because some might end up with their copyright material. They install software on you machines becuase you might try to copy one of their cds. They now block 10,000 search terms on Kazaa because they might be used to 'steal' their copyright material. And for the many people who wish to use those terms for ligitimate reasons? Tough luck.

Have a look at the riaa web site, and you will read much about how they see themselves as the protectors of culture and music. What a load of crap. They are just middle men, and middle men that have no purpose, now that technology can provide the functionailty that they have in the past.

LimeWire, eMule, BitTorrent

10,000 words list? I can pretty much bet that most of these will be very general i.e. 'Kylie' instead of 'Kylie Minogue', so any artist named Kylie who want to bypass the grabing hands of the record industry and distribute themselves will now have a much harder time.

No. Independent artists can use LimeWire, which now recognizes Creative Commons licenses on shared media. Or she can use eMule or BitTorrent. But then, independent songwriters will still run into the risk of subconsciously copying a copyrighted song [slashdot.org].

Re:A simple solution.

*shrug* Just like every other form of copy protection this inconveniences Average Joe but doesn't stop a dedicated attacker. Remember the old C64 days with software that would check for bad sectors on the floppies they were distributed on? Remember "fast hack'em" which copied discs bitwise to avoid the trap? Remember codewheels and how folks dis-assembled the app to provide the answers the game would actually ask for? Remember manual checks and how folks just shared photocopies of the relevant portions of the manual? As I recall SimCity originally had a copy protection screen which required you to hold a small red lens against the page in order to read the right answer -- I seem to recall that the solution was to wrap the entire manual in three wraps of the pink Reynolds wrap before copying it with the brightness turned down a touch.

And notice how many games I haven't mentioned which have been hacked by dis-assembly alone and JMP instructions to bypass the copy protection checks.

The world is now a world where digital information is passed from point to point without any real interference. A "recording industry" is a relic of times gone by -- if they'd slim down and offer cheap recording to all then they'd be able to make a tidy profit 'cause _everyone_ wants to record something these days and studio space is not that expensive to maintain...

The inteersting bit from the article

...was about Audible Magic, a technology that is supposed to identify music from a "fingerprint", regardless of what it's called, and theoretically would negate the need for a keyword search filter. I'd be genuinely interested to see how this works, given that different mp3 encoders produce different results given the same CD or can use different bitrates - and that's without OGG, WMA and other home-creatable formats.

Maybe it's a large scale meatware solution where a downloading clip is streamed in real time into a room full of music experts, probably in Bombay?

Several Obvious Problems:

1) Generic terms to block will make it difficult to search for other items. My favourite artist, "Kylie Kylie" distributes only through Kazaa. Now I can't find her stuff.

2) Not everything related to those the scum are allegedly protecting is copyrighted. I'm sure there used to be several free public domain photos of Eminem that you could find on Kazaa. No longer possible.

3) They just plain suck, don't they?

Idiots. Instead of researching the reason why people are willing to download music from P2P (such as CDs no longer being a trustable source, and legally downloadable music has impractical DRM and low quality sound, prices too high across the board) they sue people and make stupid keyword blocks on software.

I always used to do the best job I could to ensure artists are compensated, by buying music I listen to (ok, the suits and lawers got the money not the artists, but that's not the point). Nowadays they're making it increasingly hard for people to actually do the right thing. Sorry, I don't want a virus ridden PC thanks to your infected CDs - I feel much safer downloading my music. And since your stupid DRM sites don't work with my music player, I have no choice but to P2P. It's your own fault, guys. Give me no valid source, and I have no choice but to make my own.

Plus they will stop being p2p

They will also want to eliminate the p2p aspect of it. From the article:

"Audible Magic involves getting the fingerprints for all songs," said a QC acting for Sharman, John Ireland. "You put a black box between two peers and if someone wants to copy something on the list, you can't do it," he said.

They want to basically make all transfers centralised through this black box, making Kazaa nothing more than a glorified web-based download service.

Not that it matters to anyone...does anyone use Kazaa anyway? Those who want to obtain their music via questionable means probably use other services nowadays.

From "Name That Tune" to "Block That Tune"...

[Constestant] I can block that tune in ONE search phrase.
[Host] Ok, Block That Tune!!
[Contestant] Asterisk.

Erotica...

...is a title [rpi.edu] that Madonna has used for both an album and a song, which seems to make using Kazaa for anything "interesting" kind of pointless.

When is the Roman Catholic Church

Going to file suit and demand that Mrs. Ritchie stop using their long term established brand name "Madonna" because it brings the brand owner into disrepute? Or have they just left it too late? I would really love to see a shootout between the RIAA and the people who gave the word "Propaganda" its modern meaning. Truth is, these "artists" have all stolen other people's words for their names - so how did they acquire rights in them?

Works both ways?

So, does this mean Kazaa users can safely share downloads that made it through the filter, without fear of being sued by the RIAA? No, I didn't think so.

Although it still might make an interesting court argument for someone with the means and motivation to actually fight one of their lawsuits. In others words, the fact that such a list, controlled by them, exists, and they fact that they chose to exclude a certain work, might be construed (by the right judge/jury at the right time) as an implicit license to share that work. So, in the best case (from the users' point of view) this could backfire on the RIAA.

Solution

Based on what has been suggested so far, I propose an "aliases list". Use absurdly commonplace strings to represent specific keyword-blocked artists/albums, and publish a lookup table. For example, "fish" could equate to "Kylie" and "the" could related to her most popular album at the time the lookup is published. Possible problem: all the false hits containing "The fish" when searching. Solution: search by file type and file size.

A little more hard work, but once again, a little thinking flattens the RIAA's spectacular uselessness. I think that they need a new body in charge of their anti-piracy initiative as they're clearly hopeless at it.

Other clients?

Last time I checked the Kazaa network, there were still some 3 million users counted, so that gives me the general idea that Kazaa is still in use... or is it?

Didn't everybody already move to KazaaLite, K++, or whatever hacked/rewritten client there is out there? Who is still using the original Kazaa client?

And how is the RIAA going to force those clients to include the forbidden search list?