kazaa

The recording industry must be smiling. A US federal judge has just ruled that making songs available on P2P networks violates copyright laws. The ruling comes from the case Atlantic v. Howell, in which the Recording Industry Association of America ... (RIAA) sued an Arizona resident for copy infringement. The defendant, whose IP address had been turned over to the court, was targeted since he made his songs available for download on the Kazaa P2P network. Members of the RIAA then hired MediaSentry Services to look into the contents of the shared folder; inside, the company found 2,329 MP3 tracks ... (view more)

The market for free music is thinning faster than a middle-aged hairline. Yeah, bad joke, but for the owners of Kazaa -- and now Limewire -- there is very little to laugh about these days. Just a week after big guns in the music industry forced ... (former) peer-to-peer file sharing giant Kazaa to pay up $100 million and go legal, it appears that the conglomeration is now ready to feast on the ultra-popular Limewire. Hot on the heels of the legal deconstruction of Kazaa, Sony BMG, EMI, Universal Music, and Warner Music Group brought the war to Lime Wire LLC on Friday. In partnership with the MPAA ... (view more)

As peer-to-peer file sharing programs are coming under fire abroad, as the American courts are taking a chunk out of one of the Internet's biggest download networks. As of Thursday morning, Reuters has announced that Sharman Networks, owners of the ... file-sharing web site Kazaa, have reached a legal settlement with a conglomeration of music industry representatives. The result will see Sharman pay EMI Group, Universal Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and Warner Music a combined $100 million in compensation. In addition, following in the footsteps of the original bad boys of file-sharing ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Paul B. writes: " Hi Dennis! I recently downloaded a free Spyware removal program called AdAware 6.0. The problem is that I am not sure what settings are safe to remove and which ones are safe to omit after it scans my system? ... ... Can you help? " My response: I have received a number of related questions pertaining to this issue, so I will do my best to explain. RE: how does Spyware get identified? AdAware and similar Spyware removal tools work by comparing Spyware signatures against known offenders present in a database. A Spyware signature can be part of a file ... (view more)

Is your computer safe from the dangers of file-sharing? I know mine isn't. Just this past Monday, I received a message stating that the file I received (through Kazaa) was infected with malicious code that could harm my computer. I was lucky that my ... anti-virus program caught the malevolent program from infecting my machine, otherwise I would have launched the file completely blind that my actions may have corrupted my entire hard drive. Indeed, a scary thought. At this point, I paused for a moment and thought to myself, "Could there be other nasty software lurking on my computer that may ... (view more)

The last newsletter sparked some interesting discussion from readers. George P. from Lakeland, Florida asks: " I have created my own downloaded CD Discs that contain movies I got from Kazaa. They play absolutely perfectly on my monitor, but I'd like ... to be able to play them on my 27 inch TV. How can I play the same VCD on my TV instead of on my monitor? " My Response: There's a few things I need to address before answering George's question. First of all, George made reference to something called a VCD, which is an acronym for "Video CD." Video CDs have been around for ... (view more)

There is a nasty worm (virus) making its way through the Kazaa file sharing network . On Friday, a friend called me up and told me that his "C drive" was full and that he couldn't do anything with his computer. So, I hopped in my car, drove over to ... his place, and cleaned up some temporary files on his system. I freed up about 400 meg or so on his C drive. Satisfied with the results, I went home. The next day, he called me back with the same problem. Oddly enough, he said the computer was left untouched since I left his house the previous night. So what happened to all the space I ... (view more)