Kazaa owner’s DRM plan
p2pnet.net News:- The entertainment cartels have been using the mainstream media to announce a so-called “victory” over Kazaa, the ill-famed p2p application which was one of the first (if not the first) systems to introduce spyware to the Net, and which was viewed by the p2p community and, until recently, by the cartels, as a pariah.
Developed by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, Kazaa was sold to Australia’s Sharman Networks, which has been under attack in Australia by the Big Four Organized Music cartel for allegedly facilitating file sharing. The company is also being sued in the US by fellow p2p application company StreamCast Networks.
Leading the assault in Oz was Michael Speck, the ex-detective sergeant who used to run the Big Four’s Australian MIPI (Music Industry Piracy Investigations) which among other things, organized the operation to sue Sharman on behalf of Warner Music (US), EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France) and Sony BMG (Japan, Germany).
Sharman had, meanwhile, been doing its level best to ink a deal with various elements of the entertainment industry so it could promote its TrueNames DRM application, touted by Altnet, the Brilliant Digital Entertainment (BDE) company powerfully associated with Sharman.
BDE boss Kevin Bermeister was doing the melding, with entrepreneur Mark Dyne in the background.
Now in three interesting and related events:
1) Bermeister heralds his plan for world Consumer Control on a page hosted by no lesser body than Big Four ‘trade’ organization the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industries) ;
2) Speck joins Altnet, claiming “I’d be working away from my moral position if I didn’t support a technology that I believe is a quantum leap forward … against unauthorised infringing activity,” says ZDNet Australia; and,
3) With indecent haste after Sharman’s ‘defeat’ by the cartels, BDE disinters a plan first mooted in 2003 under which Kazaa and Altnet jointly released a bundle of file-swapping software apps, complete with a new “high-security peer-to-peer network and a program that will pay users to be a part of it,” as CNET News wrote at the time.
“Bermeister was instrumental in creating the modern version of Kazaa, introducing Sharman Networks CEO Nicola Hemming to the original creators of Kazaa in the Netherlands,” it said. “Hemming’s original plan for the file-swapping service was long intertwined with Bermeister’s vision of using it to distribute authorized conent [sic], although Bermeister denies being one of Sharman’s as-yet-undisclosed investors.
“The Altnet CEO has spent a year talking to executives at the large content companies and claims to have won some friendly ears among new media executives. However, concerns about litigation and Kazaa’s ultimate legality blocked any deals.”
Not any more.
Altnet says its Global File Registry, “stands ready to provide online content management and protection for all responsible participants in the digital marketplace”.
And the company’s newest employee, Michael Speck, states,”Global File Registry will improve online distribution channels for content owners, while empowering consumers by increasing the number of legitimate access points to the content they choose.”
Empowering consumers? Not while Sharman and the cartels are on the earth.
According to Altnet [read Sharman], Global File Registry is the cornerstone of its, “online content protection and digital crime prevention” strategy. “Developed by experts in online distribution, content protection and anti piracy activity, Global File Registry (GFR) is a giant leap forward for content owners and law enforcement agencies to control piracy and criminal activity on the Internet,”
Anti-piracy?
“GFR is a consolidator of infringing file intelligence, enabling co-operating participants to electronically defend the legal rights of copyright owners and law enforcement authorities without impacting the privacy of users,” says Altnet, going on, “GFR leverages the Altnet TrueNames patent portfolio by locating TrueNames (unique identifiers) in a centralized database so that known infringing files can be acted upon.”
TruenNames was once described by Freenet creator Ian Clarke as a lame duck.
GFR will work its magic by “protecting” users from “inadvertent or spontaneous criminal or civil digital infringements” by “preventing downloading of known illicit files”.
This is extremely interesting given that most of the approximately 19,000 men, women and children currently being victimized by the Big Four’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) were Kazaa users. And many of them say they had no idea that, when they were using Kazaa, they were also enabling the “inadvertent or spontaneous criminal or civil digital infringements” because they hadn’t closed off the Kazaa download directory.
And they hadn’t done that, they say, because Sharman/Kazaa failed to provide clear information that this was essential to prevent inadvertent infringement. Nor did Sharman/Kazaa provide clear, easily understandable instructions on how to take the directory offline.
Be that as it may, even with the corporate entertainment cartels implicitly backing Sharman and Altnet’s most recent lame duck, GFR, the chances of it and/or and Kazaa suddenly gaining credibility are zero.
And with Sharman and its friends now close to the cartels, which have been single-mindedly attacking their own customers, we haven’t seen reports, anywhere, of what will happen to the huge amount of personal and other information Kazaa holds on its users and former users.
Meanwhile, Kazaa ceo Nikki Hemming is continuing with her lawsuit against p2pnet, a tiny, one-man site based on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. Sharman, too, was suing p2pnet, but dropped out.
Hemming is alleging libel, specifying a p2pnet story which quotes an Associated Press report of court proceedings in which Hemming was questioned about the sale of her “multimillion dollar Sydney mansion.” The p2pnet post also contained a reader’s comment, and Hemming is demanding the identity of the poster.
However, p2pnet didn’t, and doesn’t have that information and, says p2pnet founder and editor Jon Newton, “Even if I had it, I wouldn’t hand it over. Because although this seems to be a case where Sharman, with all its millions, is suing me, a web site operator whose barely able to support himself, p2pnet and his family on income the site derives from advertisements. But really, it’s about freedom of speech in Canada.
“If Sharman wins, everyone with a blog, or who posts to a blog in this country, will be in serious danger because under Canadian libel law, in effect, defendants in defamation cases are presumed to be guilty unless they can prove themselves innocent.”
Newton is currently in Toronto for a Freedom of Online Speech round table to be held at the Centre for Social Innovation, 215 Spadina Avenue, Suite 120, between 3 and 5 pm tomorrow (August 5). It’ll be followed by a fund-raising concert at the Rivoli on Queen Street, starting at 9:00 pm.
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
~Mahatma Ghandi
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August 4th, 2006 at 10:00 pm
“infringing file intelligence”
This would be similar to an “illegal immigrant intelligence” registry that belongs to (temporary) private companies (surely there will be competitors) for use by individual jurisdictions (such a indivudual american states) that voluntarily buy the service until they tire of it, with data compiled in many different countries with different and conflicting copyright laws. Too ambitious and cannot possibly work.