KaZaa Ignores Court Order to Shut Down

An anonymous reader submitted that "The Amsterdam district court ruled two weeks ago that the KaZaa P2P program is acting unlawfully by making software available that allows users to download music files and must shut down. The court gave the company 14 days to do this or face $40,000 US a day in fines. KaZaa has chosen to ignore the shutdown order."

still talking (ZDNET)

[leuk_he]

from This dutch article [zdnet.nl] In conclude the bumra-stemra and kazaa are still talking. This based there there is no effectuation of the fines

Re:Damn. Another one.

[sulli]

The DMCA is just stupid.

It is, that's correct. However, this case is in Holland, and the DMCA is a US law, so your comment isn't as relevant as you think.

NO...

[DAldredge]

No, the client has to connect to a central server to login to the network..

Re:Umm...

[jilles]

There have been a few recent major screw ups at the dutch OM (the dutch district attorney). Consequently, they'll be reluctant to take on a high profile case that has a good chance of blowing up in their face. Legally speaking, Kazaa is not doing anything wrong (at least, that would be hard to prove). The fact that the most useful application of their software is trading warez, divx and mp3 is irrelevant since they do not actually engage in the transactions themselves (unlike napster).

Basically what Kazaa said is that they have no way to comply with what the dutch judge told them to do (namely to put an end to the illegal exchange of the above mentioned stuff using Kazaa). It is simply not feasible since the transactions are fully peer to peer. The searches nor the downloads go through a central server.

In any case, Limewire 2.0 is available now and has some new features that should enhance scalability of the gnutella network greatly. Gnutella is open source and has no dependencies on a login server (unlike Kazaa) eliminating the last link to a central server. If Kazaa is going to lose their case it will be because of the logins.

Re:Actually Surprising?

[Gorgonzola]

First of all I'd like to point out that Amsterdam is just a bloody city in the Netherlands, not a jurisdiction on its own. On the point of laws that are not enforced in the Netherlands, there is a distinction between public and private law in the so called civil law countries. Public law governs the relations between government and the citizens, private law governs the relations between citizens. Going after a citizen who has violated a regulation that is part of public law, for example the penal law on substances of abuse, is a typical governmental task. Here a peculiar principle kicks in. Penal laws that give the government the right to prosecute someone tend not to oblige the government to do so. Hence the government can decide to dedicate scarce law enforcement resources to prosecuting criminals they deem more harming to society, e.g. people mugging old ladies, than some pothead peacefully smoking his gear. Since copyright law is mostly private law, principles such as this do not apply at all. Basically copyright holders trying to get a court order in order to prevent their intellectual property from being infringed is an entirely different kettle of fish.

Re:Good

[Dutchmaan]

Actually yes... If you own a flea market and someone is selling drugs there then you are indeed liable under the law as a property owner.

About spyware

[CptnHarlock]

As you and others have said KaZaA does include spyware. In older versions it was optionable, but in the latest so called "security fix" it's mandatory.

However. There are alternatives and one of the less known ones is Grokster [grokster.com]. This is also an official client to the fasttrack network and it does also include spyware but you can disable it. Actually it's disabled by default! I've been using it and when I've checked with AdAware it's green. So go get it!

Meanwhile. What happened to giFT/OpenFT [giftproject.org]?? I'm still waiting.. :)

Freenet

[arodland]

I just took a look at a recent freenet .4 snapshot this morning, and between the software actually working and the web of freesites that's growing, it looks like it's approaching usability.

That was always my gripe with freenet, that it's been too damn hard to use... Keep up the improvements, guys, for everyone's sake.

Re:Another order....

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

Mayhaps you should use the offical link [lavasoft.de] then...

Just a thought.

Re:No centralized server.

[EllisDees]

Check out LimeWire.org. The next version of the software (2.0) will have an implementation of the concept of super peers - similar to what the FastTrack network does - but with no central servers at all.

That was then, this is now

[fm6]

The case you're thinking of involved Jackson's forced removal of the Cherokee Nation [allthingscherokee.com] from its homeland in Georgia to its current home in Oklahoma. I believe something like half the Cherokee perished on the trip. That kind of genocidal action was common in the 1830s. But nowadays political leaders who pull that stuff end up in a cell in the Hague [bbc.co.uk] -- or at the end of a rope in Spandau [mtsu.edu].

What Jackson actually said was, "John Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it now if he can." Please note that name. Marshall was the first jurist to argue that the Supreme Court could review the actions of other branches of government [jmu.edu]. In 1830 this concept was still controversial. Now it's universally accepted. Recent presidents ignore the Court at their peril. Eisenhower enforced court orders he empahtically disagreed with [state.gov]. Nixon was forced to obey an order that cost him the Presidency [c-span.org]. FDR, probably the most popular President in history, couldn't even get away with adding friendly judges to the court [nara.gov].

Re:Let's get things straight

[Hal-9001]

But when the agent is running, you get a stream of annoying popups. So people only run they agent when there's something to download.

It's really a trivial thing to disable the popups in KaZaA. All of the popups are routed through a single domain (twistedhumor.com, IIRC, which is the same domain used by several other P2P clients for their popups), so it's very easy to lock out that domain, for example, by adding it to your "Restricted Sites" in Internet Explorer and disabling everything (ActiveX, Java, Javascript, etc.).

Re:About spyware

[Hal-9001]

Grokster's spyware is not disable by default. I just installed it today to see what it was, and I had to uncheck a checkbox so that Gator (known spyware) would not install.

Re:NO...

[zeno_2]

No, the client doesn't actually. They could take their servers down, and we could still trade files. I think the servers that they have up only give you the news on the front page when you start the program up. The actual searching of files uses supernodes (if you have broadband, kazaa, morpheus, etc will enable your machine as a supernode, pretty much indexes what people have shared, and my computer will be one of the machines that does the search when someone searches for something).

The article is _WRONG_

[toadnine]

*Sigh*

The mp3newswire.net story is complete bollocks... they probably thought: 'hey, more than two weeks pasts, KaZaA hasn't shut down, they're probably ignoring the verdict...'. The quotes in the article are even based on things said weeks ago!

What's the _real_ story?

Is was already posted a week ago on a Dutch site [emerce.nl]

The most (and only) interesting part of the article: (translated)

A spokesman from KaZaA's main office in Sweden explains they don't need to [shut down] yet. "Since we're negociating with Buma/Stemra right now, we are not forced to shut down"

Tsssk... if only more people could read Dutch :-p

Re:Water Under Bridge

[james_pb]

When you want water in North America (at least the bits I've lived in), you go through years and years of vicious political and legal battles (and in the not-to-distant past, you used live ammunition) to get that water. Maybe there are parts of the world where that's not true, but I've never lived in a place where water rights and use weren't some of the absolute hottest, most contentious issues around. And you certainly can't transfer meaningful quantities of the stuff without even more battles, since different users are charged different rates and have different access rights. Just because something is a commodity doesn't mean it's conflict-free.

Re:NO...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, you are wrong. Starting three months ago, they have relied on central servers. KaZaA/Morpheus/Grokster no longer works without them, and hence giFT, an open version of FastTrack does not work.

If you want more details, goto #giFT on irc.openprojects.org, ask for jasta.

-jasta
lead developer giFT, openFT, gnapster

Re:Good

[foobar104]

Sorry. The laws being passed recently, and the motivations behind them, make respect and honor quite difficult. And it's not at all clear that it's worth the effort.

Unless you want to contend that Robin Hood respected the laws of King John (he was careful not to get caught, so an argument could be made).

First of all, Robin Hood is fiction, and besides that the story predates the modern legalistic society.

'Round about the time of the American and French revolutions a shift took place in world politics. The absolute authority of monarchs began to be replaced by the absolute authority of The Law. I don't mean any one law specifically, but rather the idea that The Law, as a body of rules, is the highest authority.

This isn't a new idea; it's embedded pretty firmly in Judeo-Christian cultures going all the way back to the time of the Hebrews. In the pre-Christian era, The Law was handed down by Yahweh himself and was considered to be infallible. The coming of the Christian church in the first century AD brought the era of the Popes, which led in part to the medieval idea of the divine right of kings. Suddenly The Law was no longer an entity of itself, but rather simply an extension of the will of kings and queens and Popes who had a divine mandate to rule.

Philosophical shifts in the 17th century led to yet another change in this paradigm. John Locke refuted the divine right of kings pretty thoroughly in Two Treatises On Government; in these writings Locke first put forth the idea of the legitimacy of government through the consent of the governed. Locke took some of the ideas of Thomas Hobbes-- notably the concept of man in a state of nature and of moral law-- and extended them, attempting to apply them to the real world in a practical sense. Locke contended that, in an ideal world, Hobbes's ideas would hold sway, but that the real world is one of scarcity, and as such it is necessary for man to willingly delegate some of his natural moral authority to society in the name of greater good for all.

Then came the American Revolution (among other changes in the world at the end of the 18th century) and with it a political system never before seen in the world: one based on the very Lockian idea of political legitimacy and the consent of the people.

Inherent in this idea is the notion that we, as citizens, must respect the law of our land, for man in the natural state and man as a citizen of the society are incompatible ideas. In order for a government to stand, all of its members must uphold their end of Locke's social contract.

A lack of respect for The Law leads to anarchy and chaos. Perhaps the anarchy may come in a small way, and be hardly noticable at first, but eventually it will erode our society and lead us back to barbarism.

So I stand by my original opinion. Disagree with laws. Disobey when your conscience tells you that you must. But if you fail to respect the law, the only source of authority that our society allows, then you're destroying our country and our society as surely as if you did it with guns and bombs.

Re:NO...

[rjch]

As I remember, one of the "security updates" to their software (to kill the open source version which they would not support) made the software dependant on "checking in" with their servers periodically. Unless this requirement was removed, then a shutdown of the parent company would be *quite* sufficient to kill file sharing using their client.