Is it just a matter of time before it get’s napstered or is it allowed to stay in business because it is a “media” sharing program rather than necessarily a music sharing prog?
The RIAA’s lawyers can only destroy one target at a time?
only time…
before RIAA lawyers attack.
Kazaa, unlike Napster, doesn’t have a central server that can easily be shut down, so it’d be harder to stop. They could shut down the company that’s making and distributing the software, but clones would pop up all over the place.
Also keep in mind that the company is headquartered in the Netherlands, making it even more difficult. Not to mention it being de-centralized and having more legitimate uses than Napster did.
The same reason that Gnutella hasn’t been shut down - filing a lawsuit against the producers of the KaZaa software would have no effect on the operation of the FastTrack file-sharing network.
At least, that’s what their hype says. The fact that you need to register a unique username, and that you can connect simply by clicking a button, leads me to believe there is a central login server. Shutting down that server would have some ill effect on the operation of the network, although the users could probably figure out a way around it.
(Contrast that to Gnutella, where there is no registration, and you need to find fellow users on IRC, web sites, or automated “host caches” before you can do any searching.)
Could it be that, besides being outside of the U.S., the central server contains only login/password info? I.e. no copyrighted/illegal content => no legal recourse to shut it down. (Just a wild-ass guess, of course.)
Actually, the shutdown of the previous Morpheus network shows that the Kazaa network can in fact be shut down; it was the same network technology as Kazaa, “Fasttrack”. The current Morpheus is now just a Gnutella client.