Court Docs Reveal Kazaa Logging User Downloads 514
Dan Warne writes "The most explosive documents in the ongoing Kazaa court case have emerged today, including logs of discussions between parent company Sharman and the Estonian developer of the Kazaa Media Desktop. They include extraordinary admissions like: "Reporting will make Kazaa look like spyware, as soon as it becomes evident we record downloads and playbacks, users will flee to competitive networks" and then "One can argue that we have knowledge of copyrighted material being downloaded in our network and have to install filters. If we are reporting [gold] files, then technically we could do the same for every file." Finally, "RIAA [could] collect the IP addresses for everyone who has searched for or downloaded that file." Despite the Kazaa developer's concerns over these issues, Kazaa went ahead with the logging." (More below.)
Warne continues "APC Magazine journalist Garth Montgomery, who has covered every day of the trial in the Australian Federal Court, says: "In a nutshell, this has got to rate as the most explosive document revealed. It makes it damn near impossible to maintain the separation theory that Sharman and Altnet rely on in terms of business independence and technical infrastructure. The control they exercise over the system is complete." Montgomery has also scanned in all the documents and made them available in PDF format, including the confidential Kazaa purchase contract and technical specifications for the Kazaa Media Desktop."
WOW (Score:5, Insightful)
Once again... (Score:5, Insightful)
...I am reminded of why I use a reputable, private bittorrent server and alternative (read: under-the-radar) means of P2P. Hasn't this been suspected about Kazaa for quite some time?
I could care less (Score:5, Insightful)
Good riddance.
They are... (Score:5, Insightful)
And stupid. They knew that they were walking a very narrow path with respect to legality. They had to be like Caesar's Wife - not only pure but seen to be pure. But instead they took their behaviour well over the line into things that they knew were illegal. And then recorded the fact that they were doing it.
Breathtaking.
Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
That's Richard-Nixon-tastic.
I'm not surprised (Score:2, Insightful)
They had it coming (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I could care less (Score:3, Insightful)
Who installed Kazza Media Desktop??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Later all eDonkey [edonkey2000.com] users switched to Overnet [overnet.com] and later on to eMule [emule-project.net] and BitTorrent [bitconjurer.org]
An open source P2P application is more safe in use than a closed source application because clever people can read and understand the code.
Oh I forgot:
1) Idea
2-6) see above
7) ???
8) No Profit
9) Sued by RIAA/MPAA...
I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
Skype (Score:1, Insightful)
The revolution will not be webcast (Score:5, Insightful)
As with the United States' ill-fated experiment with "Prohibition" back in the 1930s or whenever it was, attempts to pressure a legitimate society-wide demand with artifical "legal" constraints simple result in a Newtonian counterforce of equal strength
Mark these words it is only a matter of time before the RIAA and company unleash one legal sully too many and the citizenry responds with clandestine acts of violence and possibly even people and/or animals.
It is clear that the individuals behind Kazaa are just a bunch of crooks trying to get rich of bootlegged goods, but so were the rum-runners of yore, and in the end, after much bloodshed and suffering , it was seen that rum could indeed be run legally with out the "sky", as it were, "falling". Let us hope those in power today come to a similar realization soon.
Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)
-Likely- not, the general consensus, to my knowledge, is that a filename is not enough grounds to sue-the company suing must prove -content-. I doubt the Kazaa logs contain a bitprint of each file, likely just an IP address and filename.
Of course, that wouldn't stop them assembling a "people to watch" list-but in reality, I imagine that the **AA's have bots that host on Kazaa and every similar and compile such a list from every IP that comes through 'em. It would be trivial to write such a thing.
But as to launching a lawsuit based just on Kazaa's logs-likely not enough evidence.
Out of Context (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:open source (Score:5, Insightful)
It could have been completely open source, and Kazaa could still keep track off all the requests that your client made.
Re:Who installed Kazza Media Desktop??? (Score:5, Insightful)
The server still tracks your downloads.
Re:Once again... (Score:2, Insightful)
That's an oxymoron.
If you trade pirated media on the service, then neither you nor it are "reputable", by definition.
Re:I could care less (Score:5, Insightful)
Any time I see someone utter or write the incorrect version of the phrase I picture the kind of person who says the latest catchphrase or buzzword without a clue to its origin and/or meaning.
Call me a snob, but I'm proud of our beautiful language (yet still more forgiving of American English than a lot of my fellow Brits).
Re:The revolution will not be webcast (Score:5, Insightful)
As with the United States' ill-fated experiment with "Prohibition" back in the 1930s or whenever it was, attempts to pressure a legitimate society-wide demand with artifical "legal" constraints simple result in a Newtonian counterforce of equal strength.
History has shown us that the government and their backers are quite prepared to fight battles they have no hope of winning.
Re:Once again... (Score:5, Insightful)
Where did he post anything about stealing peoples property? You're as bad as the xxIA.. p2p is evil, its STEALING, which even in the case of piracy (of which the parents post in NOT talking about) is not stealing.. its copyright infringement.
p2p can be used for many legitimate purposes.
Re:Once again... (Score:5, Insightful)
Your ability to setup a bunch of different programs and scripts has NOTHING to do with privacy.
Privacy is all about trust and knowledge of the people you're talking to. Nothing to do with removing logs and setting up eggdrops.
It's SO OBVIOUS that this site is moderated by young children now, you can see them reading the parent and thinking "Oh yea, I can do that, I totally agree"
He's trolling about rooting a server then handing out logins to his l33t mates.
You probably can't mod this post down any lower, but please think about modding the parent down. Or if you choose not to do that, please post here why it's informative.
Re:Who installed Kazza Media Desktop??? (Score:2, Insightful)
Well... in theory, you can look through the source to find any malicious code, and since they know you can look at the source, they won't even try programming adware-like capacity into it.
Also, in theory, if you have a software firewall, hackers will see the firewall and just know that your machine is totally secure (seeing that you took care to install a firewall) and just give up attacking. In theory.
Re:Management ignored the developers? (Score:3, Insightful)
With best regards, Management.
It's not an oxymoron. (Score:2, Insightful)
If this underground bittorrent service has both a good reputation and it is honorable (ie: they are not screwing their users), it is reputable. It doesn't matter that you don't like what they are doing, or that it is illegal.
I'll thank you to stop pissing on my language and twisting it for your own purposes. I'm having enough bloody trouble with marketroids making the word "buy" mean "license".
The dangers of decentralized business? (Score:5, Insightful)
As I remember reading, Kazaa was such a hard legal target to bring down because of how decentralized the business is. Servers in one jurisdiction, employees in another, the company registered in a third, bank accounts in another, and onwards, etc.
While it offers an extraordinarily complex legal knot to untangle for anyone trying to bring a suit against them, once they do land in court, the company's internal workings will all be well documented because everyone communicates through email or IM. Oops.
Re:Who installed Kazza Media Desktop??? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know anything about eMule/Overnet but I assume they're traditional p2p software, the same as BitTorrent - in that you can see what you're downloading and from whom. So your next comment about open source p2p apps being "more safe in use than a closed source application because clever people can read and understand the code" is only true if you're defining "safe" as "less likely to be infected with spyware/adware/affected by crashes/exploits".
Open source p2p applications that follow the "traditional" model of just connecting to peers and sharing requested files directly aren't "safe" if you mean in terms of avoiding prosecution - what you're sharing can still be tracked pretty easily.
Open source applicatons like MUTE [sourceforge.net] or Freenet [sourceforge.net], on the other hand... Of course, they have their own issues [sourceforge.net].
Re:glad i never used kazaa (Score:2, Insightful)
You sure that everyone wants free music? Or just a majority? I am dubious even that is true.
Nonetheless, in a democracy the laws should not necessarily reflect what the majority wants. Foremost they should in fact make sure that the majority does not infringe on the rights of the minority. If "everyone" wants a free Porsche, to kick the Jews out of the country, prevent black men from marrying white women, and lock up the gays, should we make it so? I know these are extreme examples, but they make the point that laws should not always reflect the majority view.
Re:Stop the Bullshit Now (Score:1, Insightful)
It wouldnt be that bad though in reality, sadly. In fact, judging by the lead programmers own figure of 2 searches/second per thousand peers (On a network of 3.5 million concurrent users), and assuming 500 bytes can store the data (IP Address of client, supernode, event type, seach string and timestamp) the figures are:-Now, I know what you're thinking, thats a shitload of dough. But don't forget, the whole case against Sharman they've been able to muster so far is that they've been making shitloads of dough on the system, so this is just easily affordable.
Pritt was right to be wary. It should never be able to stand in court in a sane world, but thanks to all those Hillary Rosens, we can now point at a bannana, call it an Orange, claim fruity infringement, discard facts and settle for large amounts of cash with teenage children. Do you think the fact that Kazaa would require developing a massive new technology just to log the actions of their existing technology, when they've got a department of programmers so stretched that they've got Estonian email addresses
This kind of recursive and fact defying legalese is just the way American courts work, and it's a sad fucking state of affairs to Austrailia go this way too.
Whether they're nice, or not . . . (Score:2, Insightful)
If you're a policeman (policeperson?), and doing your job right, you want to serve, to help people, to protect.
Then you have to stop, for speeding, one of these citizens that you want to help, and they start lying and trying to weasel their way out of something that they knew they were doing illegally, like a bratty 3-year old, only probably with worse language. The citizen ends up in his weaselly arguments at the conclusion that it is your fault that he was speeding in the first place. You are level-headed enough to write the ticket anyway. Three days later the police chief calls you into his office and explains that the speeder was the mayor's nephew, circuitously asks about ways to let the nephew off the hook. Now, you have to either stand up for your word, the law, and your principles, and risk losing your job, or knuckle under to petty corruption and lose a little more self-respect.
I think it wouldn't take very long for me to get cynical with a job like that.
You know... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's safe to say that just by association, it further sullys the reputation of their competitors, too.
Re:Oh, Lordy, here we go again (Score:5, Insightful)
And complaining about those who object to calling infringment "stealing" twisting words is getting it entirely backwards. It's those who call infringement "stealing" who are trying to sidestep the entire question about what, if anything, is being done wrong.
If you want to say that copyright infringment is immoral behavior, you have to make that argument. Not declare the case closed by calling it "stealing" and ridiculing anyone who objects to the metaphor.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
He was a politician, they're all crooks.
Re:WOW (Score:2, Insightful)
What would be a good idea is 1) only give out the first chunk to clients claiming to not have anything, and optionally 2) track what blocks clients claim to have. If you've given them all of block 3 and they say they only have block 1, give them block 3 only. Similarly keep track of all the data one's sent a particular client and only give them data from the block you started to until they start responding to others that they do indeed have the data.
This way if there was corruption of data on the line and they had to delete the block, they can still possibly get the block instead of being blacklisted because they were unfortunate enough to have corruption. However the extra tracking might be more hassle than it's worth. It wouldn't be too hard to have a leacher remember who gave them what and respond appropriately to them when they're inquiring what blocks they have vs. need.
Re:P2P=Stealing? It's going the other way now. (Score:4, Insightful)
If P2P really kicks off then they're not going to be able to "push" their latest crap at people any more. Using P2P transfers everything to a "pull" model and, who knows, people may actually start looking for new interesting stuff on their own. Before too long independent artists/small time players will get equal access to "ear space".
And once their distribution monopoly is cracked they'll go the way of the dinosaurs. They know this, we know this. That's why they're after P2P.
"Illegal" downloads are the best free advertising the music "industry" ever had (just look at the relationship between CD sales and downloads from Napster and Audiogalaxy)
Their problem is that they just can't sell the same amount of crappy advertising or rig the playlists any more. Their payola funds will come to nothing and the "indutry" parasites will have to work for a living.
That's why they're crying.
Well, actually.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Once again... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're as bad as the xxIA.
People demonize the RIAA in order to remove the guilt they feel and paint someone else as the bad guy doing wrong in order to justify their actions.
p2p can be used for many legitimate purposes.
But 99% of the time, it's not.
Why would someone on a P2P network worry about downloads being logged by the servers if they weren't trading anything illegal? Come on, we're not stupid. I wouldn't give a crap if some Kazaa server recorded that I shared Slackware 10.1. Did you know--gasp--Slashdot is logging your actions on its site right now? Horrors!
Re:Glad... (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference is, porn makers are once again at the forefront of technology and realize "hey, this is what people want, we can't fight them, lets find out some way to make money off of it".
So what happens? You get tons of free porn off Kazaa and the TGP sites, and they manage to get plenty of people to actually pay for those sites to make them money. Especially with these new reality themed pornos that are out there, because when you've seen one girl, you suddenly get curious and want to see them all, so you check out the page to see what other models they have, and hey, you just might decide to sign up because its only a couple of bucks.
As funny as it may sound to some, there's a lot of industries out there that could take some cues from the porn industry.
Re:Once again... (Score:3, Insightful)
p2p can be used for many legitimate purposes.
Oh, quit it. Debating for hair-splitting's sake can be a fun mental exercise, but come on. The majority of the P2P/IRC/Usenet community is not using these file sharing capabilities to trade Grandma's recipe for Alaskan upside-down cake. Quit hanging on to a technicality of decency. Sure, I'll get modded down by the screw-the-man idealists, but you know that's how this sharing system plays out in the end. Movies, music, computer games, and porn.
The RIAA/MPAA isn't correct, but neither are the P2Pers. What you've actually stumbled into is morass of legal rhetoric and artistic dogma that hides greed on one side and a refusal to pay for services on the other.
Re:Once again... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh, Lordy, here we go again (Score:3, Insightful)
Copyright infringment means copying Doom 3, which is different from taking [a copy of] it. Since you appear not to understand this, let me make an analogy: Say you've got a can of soda that you're about to drink. Then I come up to you, take it, and drink it myself. You'd be pretty upset, right? Well, that's because I stole your soda and you don't have it anymore. Now, imagine instead that I take it, magically duplicate it so that now there are two cans of soda, and then give one back to you. So you still have a soda to drink, and now I have a soda to drink too. Would that still be stealing? Moreover, would that even be a bad thing? Keep in mind that you still have your copy, and that there was nobody involved in the transaction except you and me.
Now, the folks at Coca-cola might get upset about that (epecially if I started selling copies), but they would be upset about copyright infringment, not stealing, because of the theory that only they are allowed to make that particular substance.
And that's the difference -- the concept of "stealing" is based on the physical fact that if someone takes an object away from you, you don't have it any more, whereas the concept of "copyright infringement" is based on philosophical arguments and balancing incentives to creation against distribution to society.
Now, you may not understand all that, but it should at least be "brain-dead obvious" that if stealing and copyright infringment were the same thing, I wouldn't have been able to spend four paragraphs contrasting them!