Very important documents reveal Sharman lies

James Delahunty
7 Feb 2005 6:44

So far in the Kazaa trial, Sharman Networks and Altnet have been claiming they are two separate companies and have nothing really to do with each other. Sharman also claim that they cannot control what Kazaa users share, and have no way of filtering their network. However, important documents disclosed today tell a different story. In fact, instead of Sharman appearing to have no control over the network, they appear to have complete control
Logs of discussions between parent company Sharman and the Estonian developer of the Kazaa Media Desktop were revealed and have some pretty startling quotes in them. It appears that Sharman can log user activity. To make it worse, they were aware that this logging could lead to legal troubles with the entertainment industry and would cause some privacy concerns. Kazaa has already got a failing reputation due to spyware they pack with KMD.

Here are just some of the amazing quotes you can take from the logs of discussion...

Reporting will make Kazaa look like spyware, as soon as it becomes evident we record downloads and playbacks, users will flee to competitive networks

Not much can be said about the above; only that it supports the recording industries claims that technically the network can be monitored.

One can argue that we have knowledge of copyrighted material being downloaded in our network and have to install filters. If we are reporting [gold] files, then technically we could do the same for every file.

Well this kind of gets rid of the "WE HAVE NO CONTROL" claim that Sharman has been spitting out in court. What this document has just done, is proven that filtering is in fact possible on the network and could have been implemented. Oh and last but not least…

RIAA [could] collect the IP addresses for everyone who has searched for or downloaded that file.

Is there any need to comment on that quote?

KMD desktop has been downloaded more than 380,000,000 times to date according to their website. That’s an awful lot of nasty spyware to be sending around the world to computer users. So has Sharman finally completely lost support and trust of the filesharing community yet?

Source:
APCmag