Kazaa site becomes legal service!!!!!

File-sharing site Kazaa will become a legal music download service following a series of high profile legal battles.

The peer-to-peer network has also agreed to pay $100m (£53m) in damages to the record industry.

The announcement follows the release of a music industry report that says more than 20 billion music tracks have been downloaded illegally in the last year.

File sharing and music piracy are key factors in the recent decline in record sales, according to the music business.

"We have won another battle in an ongoing war," said John Kennedy, chairman and CEO of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industries (IFPI). "We move forward with a spring in our step."

more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5220406.stm

Just like napster did.

First there was Napster. Only Napster.


As the industry sues each of these sites, two more pop up in their place. I wonder where it's gonna end...

in the long-running decline of music sales.

:headbang:
rocknation

..right out of my mouth.

Cheers :toast:

So, anyway, my question is this. (And this will intentionally be a bit vague so as not to create too many search-able keywords.)

Why are networks like this so popular, particularly the ones that operate on the edges of the law? This is a question asked in all seriousness that, hopefully, someone will attempt to answer. I've tried all of them at one point or another, mostly in the name of experimentation, and I never found one I could tolerate. The speeds you get basically suck no matter how good your connection is, and you're never really sure what it is you're actually getting. When you do, the quality is often horrible. I downloaded an .iso once for what was supposed to be a data DVD image with an Linux distro on it, which would have been perfectly legal. The size was right, so I had no real reason to question it. It took four days on a 9MB/s connection constantly on, which was irritating, but when I did a MD5 checksum it was okay. Then I tried to burn it and I found out it wasn't an .iso at all but something very much not even close to what I thought I was getting. (It was a .rar file the size of a DVD with shit on it that I'll just note I didn't want. It had been renamed apparently to try to throw off those who investigate such things.

And that was the last time I used such a service.

Even had the file been what I was looking for, and even if what you get is usually what you want to get, why?

My question is prompted by the fact that other avenues for sharing data exist that are a) far more anonymous on the receiver's end, b) tend to be populated by people who know what they are doing, take a certain level of pride in it, and don't tend to do things like mis-label stuff or offer crap, and c) give you speeds as good as or nearly as good as what your connection will allow. Such avenues have also been around longer than the Internet as we know it. Sometimes it's a hit-or-miss game finding what you want, but it is generally around somewhere if you have enough patience to search. I wanted to see Pink Floyd's performance at Live8, for example. I couldn't get it via broadcast, and no one is selling it (and I would buy it if I could find it, btw) so I went in search of it. It took me about an hour to find it. I downloaded the whole thing in under an hour, and was happily watching it the same afternoon I decided I wanted to see it. I also find broadcasts of a lot of radio shows this way, which you generally will not find on networks like Kazza.

So, other than the search function, what's up?