AfterDawn: News

Australians blocked from Kazaa use?

We reported a couple of weeks ago that Kazaa had been given a deadline to start filtering copyrighted material or shut down completely by an Australian court. It was expected that a filter of about 3,000 words would be added to the P2P client, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Instead it appears that Kazaa is going to be refusing service to Australian users and everything will continue as normal around the rest of the world. Here's a message on Kazaa.com to Australians...

Attention Users in Australia:
To comply with order of the Federal Court of Australia, pending an appeal in February 2006, use of the Kazaa Media Desktop is not permitted by persons in Australia. If you are in Australia, you must not download or use the Kazaa Media Desktop.

Along with that, a lot of Australian users are reporting problems trying to connect to the FastTrack network with their current Kazaa installations. Any visit to Kazaa.com with a ".au" IP Address also redirects to a completely different page which you can see by clicking here. So will Sharman Networks be able to avoid filtering by blocking its service from Australian users?



Source:
Slyck

Written by: James Delahunty @ 5 Dec 2005 9:45

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• 11 comments

• lxfactor

  kazaa is dead. so nobody cares.

  5.12.2005 10:30 #1

• Dela

  great attitude to have; "i dont care", especially when the kazaa case set precedence for all future cases againt your favourite P2P spots. The question was simply, should Sharman be punished because third party users use it for copyright infringement? The court basically said yes, and wants the FastTrack network to be "filtered" and monitored. So it's a win for entertainment companies over tech companies. The ruling by U.S. Supreme Court will have the same effect in the United States. So ye, kazaa, might be a pile of crap, but this case was important, it effects all P2P, and effects the technological innovation, simple. So don't get caught up on the fact that it is Kazaa, remember it's a P2P service.

  5.12.2005 10:36 #2

• umug

  Who cares, it's Kazaa, only designed for kiddies who can't figure out how to use a decent P2P program.
  
  If you want malware, spyware, viruses, Trojans, more fake and misnamed files than any other P2P program plus you are too lazy or stupid to install a good file sharing program then Kazaa is for you ;)

  5.12.2005 10:36 #3

• Lethal_B

  Great article, Dela.
  
  This particular incident is rather comical~ the "oh you don't agree with our program, so screw you" attitude that Sharman networks has adopted. My view is, they should quit while they are 'ahead'. The programme is pretty much finished anyway, it's not as if there is a lot left to fight for...

  5.12.2005 11:41 #4

• NixC

  lxfactor (Junior Member) 5 December 2005 15:30
  kazaa is dead. so nobody cares.
  
  Yes i think kazaa is dead to, but you would be stupid to use any p2p programs anyway, well that's what i think. =)

  5.12.2005 21:03 #5

• andmerr

  Quote:Any visit to Kazaa.com with a ".au" IP Address also redirects to a completely different page which you can see by clicking here. So will Sharman Networks be able to avoid filtering by blocking its service from Australian users? well so can i get around it as i have 2 but for the same IP.
  
  ones .au
  the others .net

  6.12.2005 01:01 #6

• k1ngS1ze

  Cant they get around the problem by getting a ip changer???

  6.12.2005 03:47 #7

• umug

  k1ngS1ze (Newbie) 6 December 2005 8:47
  Cant they get around the problem by getting a ip changer???
  
  I thought so too, NOT that I would install the shite program ever again after reformatting to get rid of the crap Kazaa infected me with.
  
  Somehow, even after using a program which hid my IP, (or is supposed to)I still got directed back to the warning page.
  
  However Kazaa Lite is still available from oldversion.com.
  
  It was, I believe, a hacked version of Kazaa without all the crap that Sharman Networks crippled computers with.

  6.12.2005 10:50 #8

• hobogod

  This is a rather hilarious thing to do. Australia doesn't have that larger population so lets just shut them out, and continue as we always have. God damn funny if you ask me.
  I live in aus and work in a computer shop so i cant wait for all the tech support calls of "i cant download music anymore, i think my usb is broken".
  Although i agree with Dela, Kazaa did exist to make money off the intelectual property of others - so outlawing them is not such a bad thing. It almost promotes the use of bittorent and other opensource p2p networks. And i hate spyware.

  9.12.2005 23:59 #9

• andmerr

  weren't we convicts once, and now they want to make us convicts again, all locked up with no key

  10.12.2005 01:20 #10

• craftyzan

  The commercial nature of the Kazaa make it very different (much less nastier) than emule and bittorrent. Emule and bittorrent are used extensively by the Linux crowd to pass around legit software. The freeware and opensource crowd code faster than the law can keep up at anyrate. If you keep your code multi-function, your gonna have filesharing somewhere somehow.

  5.10.2006 03:22 #11