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Kazaa Forced To Modify Search Engine
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Fri Nov 25, 2005 05:35 AM
from the can't-find-that-here dept.
from the can't-find-that-here dept.
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."
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Methinks (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Methinks (Score:3, Funny)
what next? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:what next? (Score:4, Insightful)
They filed this lawsuit so they could cut some annual spending.
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.
Parent
Re:what next? (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Parent
Re:what next? (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly!
Personally, Ive found so may more groups that are orders of magnitude better than the garbage found on the radio and what is 'popular'. But then, the only reason its popular is because people want to buy the song they have heard 50X in one day... for some reason...
When did it end for me? Around 1999-2000 when the group 'metallica' put their ugly mugs before congress and told of the big bad wolf out on the internet that was stealing from them. There was no bigger irony I have seen than the group
Control (Score:5, Interesting)
Prevent your competition from getting exposure = preventing them from becoming 'real' competition.
Me? Paranoid? naaaaaaa.
Parent
Re:Control (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Control (Score:4, Interesting)
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.)
Parent
Re:Control (Score:3, Insightful)
It's by no means similar to web page censorship that confuses breast cancer with porn.
How not, specifically?
Re:what next? - PAY ATTENTION HERE. (Score:3, Interesting)
The goal of anti piracy measures is not (realistically) to eliminate all piracy. Rather, it's to make piracy a relative hassle so that more people will stay clear of it.
For EVERY anti-piracy mechanism there will be some workaround - be it a rename, a magic marker, a shift key, a crack, a patch, or whatever. That's not the point. The point is that the more of a pain or the more specific knowledge it takes to do such a work
Re:what next? (Score:3, Interesting)
I know, damn them, selling products for money. That's the most disgraceful thing I've ever heard.
How can they be so audacious to want to prevent the illegal distribution of things they sell?
Re:what next? (Score:3, Insightful)
"downloading and uploading copyrighted material without permission of the copyright holder is illegal. It is theft."
it is illegal because the music industry has lobbied for it to be so. that doesn't mean it *should* be illegal, though. file sharing networks *should* be available to facilitate legitimate fair uses such as sampling and space-shifting.
for example, if i want to sample a new song, i shouldn't have to go to a friend's house, go to the music store, or wait for it to come on the radio. if mi
Re:what next? (Score:3, Funny)
TV sets, cell phones, cars, that sort of thing? really?
must be hard to digitize. bandwidth's pretty expensive for transporting physical objects.some sort of macro version of quantum teleportation.
OH, you mean ideas, like music? i didn't know one could steal music from people. wow.
the only solution to this problem will come from further advances in fMRI mind monitoring technology over the next couple of decades. we will finally stop the theft of immaterial objects from people's minds when we ca
Same legal battle (Score:3, Funny)
Bring on the l337 speak! (Score:4, Funny)
And remember the DMCA (Score:4, Informative)
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 !!!
Parent
Eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:Eh? (Score:2)
Horay! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Horay! (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't try to spin this as something positive. Those independent artists could already use Kazaa as a marketing/distribution channel.. the presence of Eminem and Madonna songs on Kazaa wasn't stopping anyone from finding independent music.
This won't make it any easier for people to find legal downloads, it'll only make it (trivially) harder to find illegal ones.
Re:Horay! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:But wait! (Score:3, Funny)
Call me stupid, but? (Score:3, Interesting)
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... (Score:4, Insightful)
In time, even more absurd terms may become blocked... eg, The [wikipedia.org].
This will block legal file transfers (Score:4, Interesting)
What about the kids? (Score:2, Interesting)
But I guess there is no money in stopping child porn.
Re:This will block legal file transfers (Score:2)
I seem to remember the same problem arising when Napster started blocking searches based on keyword. A lot of people were very cross that their own music they were sharing got blocked along with the RIAA's stuff.
With Kazaa, it's even worse because people share all kinds of material; as you say, it's yellow
Re:This will block legal file transfers (Score:2)
kazaa is dead long live p2p. (Score:4, Informative)
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]
Re:kazaa is dead long live p2p. (Score:2)
This might be even faster than p2p over broadband, provided your friend lives near and you've got enough content to exchange.
Re:kazaa is dead long live p2p. (Score:2)
Re:kazaa is dead long live p2p. (Score:3, Interesting)
An while I am at it, emule is excellent, and they are probably the next target, they better get ready fo
Kazaa history (Score:3, Insightful)
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! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Blocking searches by artists' names (Score:2, Interesting)
Arrogance of the RIAA (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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].
Parent
Big deal, kazza sucks anyway (Score:2)
If the RIAA wants to attack an open source client with copies of the source code on websites all over the world and a licence that lets anyone make any changes they like and redistrubute, good for them.
This changes nothing? (Score:2, Insightful)
And as nobody uses Kazza because of it's malware payload putting a blocklist in Kazza alone has about as much affect on piracy as blocking searches in bittorent.com
Please correct me if I'm wrong!
The inteersting bit from the article (Score:4, Interesting)
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: (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
"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.
Erotica... (Score:3, Funny)
When is the Roman Catholic Church (Score:3, Interesting)
Works both ways? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:A simple solution. (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Parent
From "Name That Tune" to "Block That Tune"... (Score:4, Funny)
[Host] Ok, Block That Tune!!
[Contestant] Asterisk.
Parent