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."

Elimination

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.

Re:Elimination

But...wouldn't that make them, at least to some, 'evil'? ...oh wait, we are talking about the movie industry, move along nothing to see here

Re:Elimination

Guys, I'd wonder what are the ramifications if a company or organization actually murder a person? The chief executive goes to jail and that's it (like mafia)?

Of course...

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...

Re:Of course...

Actually you have the answer in there.

Put the CEO of sony in jail and you creater a recursive loop that will make all RIAA and MPAA members heads explode.

you single handed discovered the one flaw in their armor. BRAVO!

So its ok for sony to sneak in root kits?

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.

Re:So its ok for sony to sneak in root kits?

MONEY.

And...

In other news, your constitutional freedom of speech has been revoked to prevent crimes such as slander, assault, libel, and copyright infringement.

Time paradox?

Australians "risk" jail? Australia was jail!

Re:Time paradox?

I went to Australia once. Going through immigration they asked me "Do you have a criminal record?", and I said "I didn't know you still needed one..."

What?

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.

Translated for those who didn't RTFA

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.

Re:Translated for those who didn't RTFA

I don't see the contempt of court here.

Court - "Fix your software to meet our requirements for our market."
Kazaa - "Nah, we'll just pull out of your market, no infringement, no issue."
Court - "Uh... like, no, you have to offer software to us so we can impose requirements on it, cause, ummm..."
Austrailian RIAA - "Yeah, cause we loose if we don't have someone to blame for 'lower profits!'"
Court - "Thats not quite right, shut up you!"

Good

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.

No. Not Good

They've got it coming and I don't really care about the P2P issues.

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.

Is the court's suggestion technically feasible?

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 [wikipedia.org] 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.

Re:Is the court's suggestion technically feasible?

Yes, Kazaa connects to a central servers, which the spyware profiteers (Kazaa owners) run.

They implemented the Australia IP block on the server, and could easily do the same with the searches. Other programs, such as DirectConnect and Bittorrent wouldn't be so easily controlled by their creator, because they run on networks that were not set up by the creator of the program.

Re:It's their own fault

Well, consider that once, their entire population was imprisoned...

Re:It's their own fault

If the media cartels get their way everyone's going to jail.

Why don't we have done with it and implement the final solution. Turn the whole planet into a jail.

The Record Company execs will of course have to be ejected into space.

Re:It's their own fault

I think jailing people for such pathetic white collar crimes is ridiculous.

They're not a danger to society; if you want to punish them, take away their computers or something. But jail? Come on!

Jail should be reserved for murderers, rapists and other violent types. Not people who write software for trading music on the Internet.

Why are governments so damn messed up?

-Z

Re:It's their own fault

That's a damn good point.
I don't want murderers or rapists on my streets, at all. Get em out.

But jailing someone for stealing a digital 'copy' where it doesn't hurt anyone is ridiculous.
So the content creator maybe lost out on a 'lost' sale. Let that content provider SUE for monetary damages if need be.

Now if the person makes digital copies for profit, then I'm for jail time because they hurt commerce and busines in general.

Re:It's their own fault

Sure, that's what the ankle bracelets are for. Program the thing sound the alarm if he goes anywhere other than his home or his work.
This way, our legal system isn't spending my tax money housing and feeding his ass, and he's forced to work to pay off what was stolen.
Now, if he had used a gun and robbed the place, he's a menace and should be locked up.
But most white collar criminals are generally just idiots that don't want to hurt people, just wanted to steal something. Don't lock them up and make us pay for them. Put their asses to work and make them pay it back.

Re:It's their own fault

Since we'll have GPS in our phones, accessible at will by spooks and cops; cameras on every corner, every highway; DNA catalogued against our will; health care taken away at the whim of unknown lords, drug testing at will by our employers; unacceptable speech not permitted on private property (almost anywhere you shop or work or park...) free speech in public monitored by the military, spooks, and the dominant political party; laws that make everyone in the world a criminal; the ability to vote taken away if we're convicted on any of these new "felonies"; and all of us subject to recordings of everything we ever do on the internet (which soon will be surfing, TV, phone, all our purchases, text messages), the ability to run for office taken away if "they" decide to broadcast any of your recorded pecadillos...

We're to be numbered, watched, recorded, arrested at will, fired at will, paid slave wages per a "free" market that somehow can't pay workers but pays the bosses ever increasing millions.

Prison can be defined as what YOU can do compared to what your jailers can do, or do to you.

How, exactly, are we all now NOT in prison? Of course, I'm speaking of the U.S, but I assume Australia isn't exactly shrinking from doing the same as the US and the EU.

This is the most important subject in all our lives. We're being locked up, and we're helping them do it.

Re:No light at the end of the tunnel

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.

Archie

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.