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Links: Kazaa Seeks to Change Public Opinion on P2P |
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Posted by Steven Wu on Thursday, November 20 @ 12:58:54 EST
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The Washington Post reports that Kazaa is launching a new ad campaign to convince the public that it is a legitimate distribution tool.
The campaign is the latest push by the Kazaa file-sharing service and its parent company, Sharman Networks, to counter a multi-million-dollar legal and lobbying effort launched by music, software and movie firms convinced that peer-to-peer (P2P) services are a major source of online piracy.
The ads invite readers and Kazaa's estimated 60 million users to "join the revolution" by proclaiming their love of Kazaa to "politicians, journalists, record labels, movie companies and friends." They also exhort the entertainment industry to embrace the "revolution" or get left behind as technology passes them by. . . .
Gigi Sohn, president of Washington, D.C.-based civil liberties group Public Knowledge, said it will be hard to rally millions of people to support something that they know in their hearts is illegal. "Whenever I talk to people about Kazaa, they treat it like marijuana -- as much as they love it, they have a sense that what they're doing is a little bit wrong," Sohn said.
The battle over copynorms continues! The problem is that I just don't see how Kazaa can refute the fact that there is a lot of copyrighted material available over its networks. To the extent that Kazaa is just arguing that P2P is not inherently illegal, they're performing a valuable public service. But to the extent that Kazaa is trying to argue that P2p in practice is 100% legitimate, they're being naive.
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Re: Kazaa Seeks to Change Public Opinion on P2P (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Friday, November 21 @ 09:42:22 EST | How is changing norms related to legality?
By making the public think that P2P is a good thing, and filesharing should be allowed/encouraged, they are probably hoping to change the law in ways that will be nice to them (much as the MPAA).
By calling it "the revolution," I think they're focus is more on uprooting convention than adhering to current ideas of legitimacy.
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Re: Kazaa Seeks to Change Public Opinion on P2P (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Saturday, November 22 @ 18:45:25 EST | You should read the campaign's site - your comments seem too be missing the key part: they're trying to get the RIAA/MPAA to license content to them. They know that infringing material is on their systems - KaZaA is not trying to refute that. This relates to copynorms inasmuch as they're trying to get the market or law-based initiatives to take advantage of P2P-based norms. |
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Re: Kazaa Seeks to Change Public Opinion on P2P (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Tuesday, November 25 @ 09:42:45 EST | Very poor analogy.
"Whenever I talk to people about Kazaa, they treat it like marijuana -- as much as they love it, they have a sense that what they're doing is a little bit wrong,"
There's a BIG difference between "wrong" and illegal. Just because something is illegal (e.g. marijuana) doesn't mean that it's "wrong". A government has no right to tell me what I can and can not ingest but an economy can impose conditions on what I ingest (e.g. making it expensive). And we all now that there are lots of things that are "wrong" (e.g. Kazaa and cheating on your partner) that are not illegal. |
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Re: Kazaa Seeks to Change Public Opinion on P2P (Score: 1) by Dave_Waters (bandit@email.unc.nospam.edu) on Tuesday, November 25 @ 21:43:21 EST (User Info | Send a Message) | If courts actually looked back, and enforced, the Sony v. Universal precedent, Sharman's vital issue would be to prove that there are significant noninfringing uses inherent in P2P networks; regardless of possible infringing purposes for which the technology may be used. Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 US 417 (1984). Because of the decentralized nature of the network, their lack of control over the content, and the arguably extensive noninfringing uses of which P2P technology is capable, it seems as though Sharman would have a case that P2P is legitimate (or at least has significantly such uses). The court in Sony looked past what video recording equipment ‘might’ be used for, and focused on allowing free progression of this technological advancement to the public. My theory is on what Sharman may be doing here is that they are acting naïve in order to at least attempt to fall within the provisions of Sony, or similar cases, asserting that they do not know what goes on inside the FastTrack Network, nor can they regulate it…thereby relying on possible significant noninfringing uses to legitimize P2P technology in practice. However, I think you are right in stating that the practice of P2P has become so tarnished that it will likely never be viewed as legitimate in any court's eyes, even with the possibility that the somewhat disavowed Sony-Betamax ruling being on Sharman's side. It seems as though we are living in a high-protectionist world, less focused on the freedom to innovate and, in result, retarding technological advancement so that the dated business models of record labels continue to prove successful with minimal adaptations. |
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