Kazaa Continues to Evolve 280
Zephy writes "The New York Times (free registration etc.. ) has an article about a new partnership between Kazaa, and Tiscali, the European internet access provider. Seems that Kazaa will carry ads for Tiscali's broadband services in return for a cash 'bounty' when a user signs up for broadband. To quote the article, 'This gives legitimacy to KaZaA.' Also, Cnet has an article about the new Kazaa version which has features designed to help users avoid corrupt or wrong files such as those spread around p2p by the MP/RIAA."
Legitimacy? (Score:1, Interesting)
Is that possible? And how does this give legitimacy to a company that spells its name in mixed case letters? I just love press release speak, says everything, means nothing.
wow (Score:3, Interesting)
"Under the deal, KaZaA's owner, Sharman Networks Ltd., will advertise high-speed Internet access provided by Tiscali, an Italian Internet provider, to its tens of millions of European users. In return Tiscali, which serves around seven million customers in 15 countries, will pay Sharman a "bounty" for each KaZaA user who signs up for its high-speed access service."
Seems like an OK move for both companies, but I think there are so few people that actually look at and consider banner ads that it won't do much good. On the plus side, Kazaa gets another partner.
It does seem a bit funny that a high speed ISP would partner up with a file-sharing company that eats up all their bandwidth. While some ISPs are figuring out how to ban them, others are joining with them. I hope they have a lot of bandwidth to spare.
Interesting developments (Score:5, Interesting)
There are several interesting developments here. For one thing, Tiscali allies with Kazaa - a natural step for them, because after all, they want to sell bandwidth, and why would people need a lot of bandwidth, if there weren't any applications like Kazaa?
Then in the second article, one of the things that's mentioned is that they partner with a music company for which Kazaa is actually the only way it distributes its music. This may be good for Kazaa's legal case, after all Napster seemed to lose mostly because they couldn't show that their networks were used legitimately at all.
On the other hand, I wonder what the judge will think of the new feature against 'bogus music and video files', that are inserted by the record companies to make the network useless. Almost all of those files will make themselves look like songs that are actually illegal to trade, so making a feature to stop them, however useful and natural to make, could be seen as actively helping to download copyrighted stuff.
But I can't really see them winning the case in the US anyway, after Napster.
Re:How odd that an ISP wants warez kiddies (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of the people I know who p2p (I don't out of sheer laziness, but then again, I've stopped buying music due to the crappiness of product right now) were not bandwidth guzzling warez monkeys but just wanted a recording of a top 40 song that they could have taped off the radio twice an hour anyhow.
So maybe Tiscali sees p2p as broadband's killer app, and has taken a more objective analysis of how their bandwidth will be affect by this partnership rather than just assuming that they'll only attract the types who throttle the pipe.
Re:The clock is ticking (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Rating System (Score:2, Interesting)
to one. Since there are millions of Kazaa users.
It would be hard for the MPAA proxies to simulate
being millions of users.
Re:I take it from the summary... (Score:4, Interesting)
IIRC, Kazaa needs Cydoor to run. Fortunately, there's a dummy Cydoor DLL [cexx.org] available. (Can't say that I've used Kazaa or Kazaa Lite in a while, though...I started running Shareaza [shareaza.com] recently, which is spyware-free, ad-free, and works with a true decentralized network [wego.com].)
Re:The clock is ticking (Score:2, Interesting)
Who's music? Your music? Music that you wrote and recorded?
You may want to share music files, but don't be mistaken: it's *not* your music unless you're the artist that made it. If you buy the CD, then you own a little round piece of plastic, but you still don't own the music.
I'm curious to know what you think of Andromeda... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm just curious if you would consider my software Andromeda [turnstyle.com] more friendly for your network. It's not like the main P2P networks insofar as you can't really use it as a mass anonymous downloader.
However, you can use it to stream your collection over a local network and/or over the Internet. Basically, it bulds a complete streaming web site from a collection of MP3 files. PHP and ASP versions are available.
There's no spyware, it doesn't need to talk 'outside' of your network, and it transfers over http so there typically aren't firewall hassles.
Best, -Scott
Re:The clock is ticking (Score:2, Interesting)
Fasttrack is proprietary, so any guess may be correct. However, they do describe their network as formed from regular nodes and 'supernodes' that act as directory services for the regular nodes. Registration is used to find the initial supernode(s), but after that it is p2p (and supernodes can appear/disappear).
So, perhaps you could shut it down by demanding kazaa tells you about all the supernodes it knows about, and following the links. That will not get everyone, since links are transitory by nature in p2p, and so being exhaustive would be impossible. Alternatively, you could demand kazaa release all the registrant names, and use those as a starting point. But not everyone will have registered (you can find your way onto the network without registering), not everyone will have been entirely truthful when they did register (credit cards will help, but not guarantee), and besides that's a lot more work.
Alternatively, you could force ISPs to filter out Kazaa traffic. This works poorly; ISPs will not filter their traffic for just anyone (and there are costs/tradeoffs involved), and people would just hide the traffic some other way anyway.
So, there is no 100% way in a technical sense. Of course there are lots of imperfect solutions, and there may be a balanced level of enforcement that would keep it out of the mainstream---the answer could be yes in a pragmatic sense.
Re:Interesting developments (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is there are much better ways to distribute legal stuff than Kazaa. A rootless peer to peer setup involves enormous networking overhead (over 1/2 the packets) that you wouldn't have with the standard download systems. I think almost all anonymous peer-to-peer file shares are going to face this problem; if what was being distributed was legal you wouldn't go to this much trouble.
I think the best thing for Kazaa would be to get political stuff of an extremely non mainstream nature: everything from KKK literature to communist party literature to anarchist stuff to taliban philosophy to Turner diaries traffic to taiwanese indepence writings
Re:The clock is ticking (Score:4, Interesting)
2: FedEx and other true "Common Carriers" have no way to tell that the contents of one wrapped package are illegal--and if they do (i.e., it's got a "do not export" label on the outside and is being shipped to Iraq), they've probably allready been sued to stop & check.
VCR recorders were declared legal because a significant legal use was declared--and then followed through on. What's the significant legal use of KaZaa, again?
Re:The clock is ticking (Score:2, Interesting)
Until it is shown that most people pirate content that they either already own, have owned, or purchase legally in the future, there's not much one can say to that. This would really be the "smoking gun" - getting a statistic that really spells out what percentage of KaZaa downloads are listened too "illegaly" (in that once its listened too, the listener should either own the song , purchase it in the future, or decide s/he doesnt like the song and never listen to it again). I really have my suspicions that the number is not nearly as high as the RIAA is trying to spin it to.
I don't have much sympathy for the RIAA tho. Yes, the rules are in their favour, but they are really abusing the system to stymie any possibility of competitors in the online music distribution industry. Its an industry that should already exist, but the RIAA's tactics just delay the maturation of the industry for us consumers.
All of this belies this simple fact, a fact that many others here have echoed: were it not for Napster, the RIAA would have *less* money in its pockets thanks to the music I discovered that I wanted to buy. It's as simple as that.
Re:Finally (Score:3, Interesting)