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Kazaa Owners Risk Jail
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Dec 15, 2005 11:34 AM
from the kazoops dept.
from the kazoops dept.
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."
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It's their own fault (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd like to see Australia try to jail that many people.
Re:It's their own fault (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:It's their own fault (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Parent
Re:It's their own fault (Score:2)
Well, considering the vast majority of us are prisoners of gravity, I'd say it's already a jail.
Re:It's their own fault (Score:2)
Re:It's their own fault (Score:2, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_colony [wikipedia.org]
The British used North America as a Penal Colony through the system of indentured servants. Convicts would be transported by private sector merchants and auctioned off to plantation owners upon arrival in the colonies. It is estimated that some 50,000 British convicts were banished to colonial America, representing perhaps one-quarter of all British emigrants during the eighteenth century. When that avenue closed in the 1780s after the American Revolution, Brit
Re:It's their own fault (Score:3, Funny)
Re:It's their own fault (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's their own fault (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Parent
Re:It's their own fault (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:It's their own fault (Score:4, Informative)
I'm sorry, I don't think society should be expected to pay thousands of dollars for a $10 CD that they could care less about. Jailing digital pirates amounts to shifting the burden from the theif to society. Such crimes need to be handled with fines and penalties, not jailtime. On top of that, any penalties collected from thiefs should first go to cover the costs of the legal system, including all involved (Judges, jurors, bailiffs, assistants, power, heating, etc).
Notice I'm not making a statement on if Kazaa and digital piracy is right or wrong. I just think that jail time is an unfair burden on the rest of us (since we have to pay for it), and that compensation should first go to the system that is persecuting. It isn't free to run a legal system, you know.
Parent
Re:It's their own fault (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:It's their own fault (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Ideology? (Score:3, Insightful)
I can name quite a few P2P software developers who would strongly disagree with your broad-stroke stereotyping on that front. For example, of the Gnutella clients listed on Wikipedia:
Acquisition, Acqlite, Apollon, BearShare, Cabos, CocoGnut, DM2, FrostWire, giFT, Gnucleus, Gtk-gnutella, iMesh, KCeasy, Kiwi Alpha, LimeWire, MLdonkey,
Elimination (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Elimination (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Elimination (Score:2)
Re:Elimination (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Elimination (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Elimination (Score:2)
Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:2)
Re:Of course... (Score:5, Funny)
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!
Parent
Re:Of course... (Score:2)
Then the solution is simple. The software industry merely needs to lobby Congress to enact a liability shield.
Re:Hypocrites (Score:3, Insightful)
So its ok for sony to sneak in root kits? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So its ok for sony to sneak in root kits? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
And... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And... (Score:2)
Explain to me, what exactly is the direct relation between P2P file sharing and freedom of speech?
Filesharing sounds a lot more like freedom of beer to me... :-)
Re:And... (Score:2)
The thing that strikes me about this story is that in the US, corporate crimes are punished by fines or by dissolution of the corporation, except in cases like Enron where it was not the corporation doing bad things but its directors. Even so, the directors were punished, not the owners (i.e., shareholders).
Time paradox? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Time paradox? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Time paradox? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Time paradox? (Score:4, Funny)
A quick google shows:
577 000 occurences of it on the web [google.com]
Parent
Kazoo owners risk jail (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Kazoo owners risk jail (Score:2)
When they locked up the harmonica players/ I remained silent/ I did not have a harmonica
When they came for the triangles/ I remained silent/ I did not play the triangle
When they came for the cowbell/ there was no one left to speak out.
What? (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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!"
Parent
Good (Score:5, Interesting)
No. Not Good (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Is the court's suggestion technically feasible? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Those terrible file sharers.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Archie (Score:5, Interesting)
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.Parent
The worst thing that can happen to copyright (Score:3, Insightful)
If 30% of the US's population gets huge fines and jailtime for their copyright infringements and/or DMCA violations.
If 90% of Israel's population gets jailtime for their copyright infringements.
If similar numbers occur in various countries around the world...
Copyright will be abolished.
Re:No light at the end of the tunnel (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:No light at the end of the tunnel (Score:3, Informative)
I read an article once that had an interview with a former Napster exec (I don't remember who) on why the RIAA settled with them. It was near the end, and it was obvious that they were going to lose, and they started talking with the recording industry. They pointed out that, hey, there's this new client out there called Gnutella, and guess what - it doesn't have a central server to take down. The RIAA
Re:No light at the end of the tunnel (Score:3, Interesting)
There was a very small segmant of the population that knew about Napster, before Metalica stepped in and made it headline news. That was where they could've nipped it in the bud and realized right then and there that the jig was up and everyone knew how much their widely available, non-tangible, forced scarcity media was really worth in economic terms.
If there was a legal way to download songs at a nickle or 50 cents (a dollar is still too much for a song to me) back then, then the societal accepta
Re:No light at the end of the tunnel (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, no, I don't know it and I've seen no evidence of this. The number of Joe Sixpacks who came to me and asked "what is napster and how do I use it", after the Metallica headlines, is astounding. Do you think Joe learned of Napster off of Slashdot? That's what I know.