Hacking Kazaa

One programmer has done it. The recording industry could learn something from this guy.

By Jimmy Guterman, April 09, 2003

Kazaa has far surpassed the late Napster as the leading file-sharing service on the Net. With more than 200 million having downloaded its Media Desktop program, it's everything that Napster was and more: Its peer-to-peer network is more reliable, its search functionality is more precise, and it can work with a broader set of file types (not just music but also video, images, documents, and software).

Of course, describing Kazaa that way is like describing the high-tech attributes of a weapons system without mentioning that its purpose is to kill people. Developed in the wake of Napster, Kazaa was intended to provide a way for people to acquire copyrighted music files without paying for them. Needless to say, the recording industry isn't fond of this kind of distribution scheme and reaches into its legal arsenal to defend itself. That's why the original company sold the program and why Kazaa's current owner, Sharman Networks, is based in either Australia or Vanuatu, depending on which Sharman press release you believe. With the Napster case as precedent, Sharman will probably have to close down Kazaa one day -- various industry organizations (in particular, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America) and Sharman are now swapping lawsuits -- and a federal judge in California has ruled that the suit against Sharman can proceed. When Sharman goes away, something else will spring up: As I write this, some 3.8 million people are connected to the service and more than 800 million files are being shared. Future attempts to capture this huge audience are inevitable.

The recording industry's complaints aside, the most annoying thing about Sharman has been its practice of embedding programs in the free Kazaa software to make money, everything from popup ads to spyware that tracks Internet behavior. So Shaun Garriock, an enterprising programmer from Scotland, came up with Kazaa Lite, a program that removes the adware and spyware from the system. In recent months, Kazaa Lite has actually surpassed the official version in quality, adding crucial new features and exterminating several of the original's nasty bugs. It shows that even renegade programs on the Net can be altered and improved by other renegades (and renegades with more altruistic motives, at that).

On one hand, Kazaa Lite is the Net at its best: An individual coder identified a program that needed to be improved and did so swiftly, cleverly, and for free. But some observers see Kazaa Lite as nothing more than an improved criminal tool that should be litigated away. The RIAA, for one, moved earlier this month to sue a student running a Kazaa-like network on a college campus.....full article

http://www.business2.com/articles/web/prin...0,48716,00.html