Docs Reveal Kazaa Logging User Downloads
Found on Slashdot on Sunday, 06 February 2005
The most explosive documents in the ongoing Kazaa court case have emerged today, including logs of discussions between parent company Sharman and the Estonian developer of the Kazaa Media Desktop.
APC Magazine journalist Garth Montgomery, who has covered every day of the trial in the Australian Federal Court, says: "In a nutshell, this has got to rate as the most explosive document revealed. It makes it damn near impossible to maintain the separation theory that Sharman and Altnet rely on in terms of business independence and technical infrastructure. The control they exercise over the system is complete."
"Reporting will make KaZaA a 'spyware', as soon as it becomes evident that we record downloads and playbacks users will flee to competitive networks.
(...)
One can argue that we have knowledge of copyrighted material being downloaded in our network and have to install filters.
Of course we won't know about downloads and playbacks of non signed content but it doesn't make difference because
1. it is hard to communicate this to users and lawyers
2. if we are reporting signed files, then technically we could do same for any file
(...)
In order for the sponsored files to be rapidly found on P2P searches they'll need to be pushed out onto supernodes - we'll need to set up a mechanism for doing this.
(...)
We need to balance carefully our business needs and KaZaA's reputation. For example Morpheus has 47M downloads vs. KaZaA's 32M only because KaZaA included 'Spyware' bundles and it's reputation suffered because of that. If we do both stats reporting and file pushing (and it will become public) it is likely that KaZaA's user base will start to decline. Also RIAA and MPAA might take advantage of that situation."
So much for being on the side of the filesharers.