Kazaa (was moral responsibility...)

[GulPlum]

I just thought I'd clear up one thing which seems to have been glossed over 
or misunderstood.

The whole point of Kazaa (and similar) is that there is NO central server, 
no central responsible party with whom one can take issue. The technical 
possibilities of these things is undisputed, and I have used Kazaa only 
once to great effect when swapping (original) material on my hard drive 
with someone 2,000 miles away (considering we were swapping over 2GB of 
data in each direction, uploading it somewhere for the other party to 
download it and upload their own files was out of the question).

However, it is a nightmare for owners of copyrighted works, because nobody 
has control over who has what and what they do with it. There is nobody to 
complain to, and nobody is in a position to enforce any kind of rule of 
law. Not technically, because the users are sharing data directly with each 
other, using the Internet as nothing more than a glorified LAN. And not 
legally, because all the Kazaa or other folk do is make the program 
available. Unlike, say, the infamous Napster, which maintained servers 
which made available records of who had what files from one moment to the 
next, Kazaa maintain no servers or records.

The program itself is perfectly legal, and although its authors are 
perfectly aware that it is almost exclusively used for sharing illegal 
files (mainly MP3s, movies and of course porn of one type or another), it 
has valid other uses, as per my own experience for instance. So unlike 
Napster, which was designed from the ground up to share MP3s, there's 
little anyone can do against Kazaa or its users.