First off, I'd like to say that I love Kazaa. It's the greatest thing ever for people like me. (A lot of you will say the same) It makes pirating so incredibly easy, I almost feel guilty doing it. (There's another grand I saved) The interesting thing is that it doesn't really feel like stealing, although it really is. I would never go to a store and steal something from a shelf, but if there's something that I want and that I can get online, if I can, I'll steal it via Kazaa. For instance, I am fronted with the question, "Should I go to the store and buy Photoshop for $500, or should I just stay home and download a pirated version for free. That program kicks major arse and without Kazaa I would probably never know that. With Kazaa, you can steal movies, mp3s, software, viruses, you name it. If it comes in the form 1's and 0's you can download it from Kazaa. Napster got into trouble with lawsuits with the music industry, and as a result was shut down. I heard something or other about it starting to sell mp3s, but the golden age of Napster has been over for some time. With Kazaa,you can do everything you could do with Napster and much more, because you're not limited to stealing just audio. However, I don't see them getting into trouble and getting shut down. I mean, I hope they don't, for my own selfish reasons. But has anyone else thought of this? Can anyone explain this?

I think the thing with kazaa is, as with napster it ran off a central server and could be tracked down. kazaa doesn't run off a central server it is just an independant program that links users together, so no one person can get in trouble for it.

Umm...I have a thread about this in Nerd culture. It's a pretty touchy subject. I think you should feel at least a little scummy not paying for any of it. I say just don't do it in excess. If you like something, buy it. There's not much else to say.

certain things should be free, but any music I download off of kazaa is just to listen to on my computer I still buy the cd's.

I think Kazaa is the same type of file sharing program as Napster, of course it's supped up. Napster was a program created by a kid in college and so it was easy for the music industry to pin this person down because he was open about being the programmer. I think Kazaa, which in my opinion, is still subject to lawsuits. I think maybe they paid special attention to the Napster lawsuit and learned what to do in the event of litigation to get away with what they're doing. In my opinion, it's remarkable that it's still running.

Kazaa does run a central server, but it does not transmit the same kind of information that napster did. From what I understand all of the data on napster went through napsters servers. With Kazaa on the other hand the location of the computers and the files that they serve is the only data that goes through the servers. This kind of information is not deemed illegal because it is simply text being transmitted from computer to computer.

As far as the music industry closing down kazaa. my personal opinion is its pointless and they know it

Refer back to the days of napster on trial. (What i know is gossip because i didn't get into file sharing until right as napster went up in flames. So plz correct anything...) They had to take Napster to trial so many times because napster kept finding ways to get around the rules...(taking vowels out of names to rename). Then as Napster went under good old kazaa and at least 4 other major ones that i know of sprang up in its place. Plus all the publicity probably even boosted participation(its how i learned about it).

So if they shut down kazaa im sure it wouldn't even be 12 hrs before a Kazaa jr. sprung up and it would be double the size of his daddy.

i love kazaa. it's better than napster ever was. i'm using kazaa lite right now. i used to use audiogalaxy before it shut down. that was better than kazaa in the sense that if you got disconnected in the midle of a download, it would start downloading from the point wheer it stopped on reconnection. not so forkazaa.

I hated Kazaa. Morpheus is dead. Napster is gone. And guess what? No one here knows about WinMX! WinMX is great. Oh yeah, I still buy the CDs to...

DC++ all the way

I had napster it went off, changed to kazaa, too much spyware, went to winmx - nothing except MUSIC!!!!!!!!!!!!

Nobody heard of Winmx - its superb and far superior to the others.....

http://www.winmx.com

Kazaa Lite has no spyware in it
DC++ is the best

i forgot about winmx. yeah it is VERY good.

Counslercoffee i disagree on WinMX..it is terrible..every thing shows up as queued and the ugly UI doesn't help other.

Airavata yes you can continue downloading from kazaa if you don't finish the first time...i do it all the time..WinMx you can't...you have a better chance of being struck by lightining than restarting your file download from the middle.

The problem many hate kazaa is that they don't know about Kazaa lite...the original kazaa is crapshoot and shouldn't be used at all. The kazaa lite version is awesome.

kazaa has more porn and viruses than it has of music........well, if that's what's your mainly interested in (porn and virii) kazaa fights the bill right on the platypus. Napster was the best interface, looking, ease of use, straight foward...even kazaaliteplus can't compare. I've tried the Gnutella network programs and they seem slightly more techhnical than Kazaa but give you better results.

I almost forgot about Gator! Do you know how much spyware is in Kazaa? A lot. More then Bozai Buddy.

sargentlard's right about kazaa lite. i first installed kazaa and it was godawful. kazaa lite is very good.

I've got to agree with sargentlard about WinMX. I can't stand using it because it takes so long to find senders without queues. When you get in a queue they just kick you off. The best file sharing program out there for me is still mIRC...although it's meant to be a chat client. You get everything almost first-hand and it's so easy to find places where you can download as fast as your maximum bandwidth allows.

heh, nobody seems to be using DC++
weird not to say more

why argue about which file sharing program is the best??

isnt it all down to personal choice?? Heard of WinMx, even tried it, but it wasn't for me so im now using Kazza Lite, cracking program, but im not saying its beter, ot worse than any other file sharing program. Never heard of DC++ tho, miight have to try it!!!

On the note of feling guilty about file sharing an al that, isnt music an art?? to open and free peoples minds, why should we have to pay all the time for this human privilege, music has been around for centuries, i know the artists have to make a living, but they only get 10% of every record they sell, so the record companies are ripping us off, as well as them, I do buy a lot of records and albums, but i also download a fair share!! I do not feel guilty about saving myself hundreds on music im not sure about, although i have to say, if i do like the music ive downloaded, i do, 99% of the time go out and buy it, i prefer originals over copies you see!!!

On the whole the entire choice of program and what to do with it is down to the preferences of the user, why argue about what other people want to use??

P.S. Where can i get hold of this DC++ to try it out??

yeah, what is DC++ anyway?

Originally posted by airavata
yeah, what is DC++ anyway?

DC++ is a client for the direct connect protocol. It lets you share files of any type. You can download it here: http://dcplusplus.sourceforge.net/

By the way its VERY popular in Avatar's country.

I use kazaa for mostly TV shows that I missed (like Enterprise :)) and movies. WINMX has all the audio imaginable, but I have a lot of trouble starting downloads of files that only 2 or 3 people have. I am getting DC++ right now

One question: Do most of you guys actually allow people to download your stuff? Do you have it set so you upload as much as you download from your respective programs?

yeah, I allow, why not
it's the idea of file sharing, no?
and since I moved from kazaa lite to dc++ it's also impossible not to allow to share, because if you don't, you simply get kicked out of the hub.

Do most of you guys actually allow people to download your stuff? Do you have it set so you upload as much as you download from your respective programs?

while i was using audiogalaxy i didn't do that. but i do that with kazaa lite. after all, the system does work only because people share their files right?

One time I was trying to get a movie from kazaa and the guy I was getting it from booted me off because I wasn't sharing. What he didn't realize is that a ton of the stuff on kazaa came through IRC, which I DO share on. Just because I wasn't sharing on that service didn't mean I wasn't helping the sharing process.

I have mine set on share.. I have my computer on all day and it has a cable connection, so I may as well share the wealth. It works out great for all Kazaa users because if I have a download going for a long time, I don't have to think about it. As long as I don't cancel the download, it automatically starts downloading again when the program is turned on, which in my case, is when the computer turns on.


When I learned this, I was very impressed by the designers of Kazaa. Because it's a file sharing program, there are many many copies of the same files on different computers. The important thing about these copies is that they are not only copies, but are EXACT facsimilies. Therefore, Kazaa can take advantage of that fact and treat multiple facimilies as one file. This allows downloading the same file from multiple sources, which is an extremely nice feature. Once all the chunks of the file are downloaded, they're brought together (by some means of address I'd imagine) to make the original file. Quite ingenius.

Here's a question some of you may have thought of too.

What are the criteria for multiple facimilies to be uploaded in conjunction? I'd imagine that they'd have to be quite perfect, but who knows. I'd imagine that they'd have to have identical files sizes (I could be wrong) The files would need to be named the same, and have the same tags.

I admit Winmx has far to large a queue; must be the "popularity", whats this DC++ thing? I may go back to Kazaa lite.

What are the criteria for multiple facimilies to be uploaded in conjunction? I'd imagine that they'd have to be quite perfect, but who knows

I am guessing that the CRCs for each file also have to be the same.