STOP YOUR SWAPPING? YEAH, SURE

The company behind the file-swapping software appears to be complying with the decision handed down by Judge R. Orobio de Castro (see story, 11/29/01), who ordered the shutdown of the sharing client and the levying of fines for every day it remained available.

But the impact of the netco’s cooperation could be negligible, for several reasons. First of all, the KaZaA client is already in wide use and, as a decentralized service, can’t easily be controlled (some say Amsterdam-based KaZaA owner Fast Track BV, now being sued by the RIAA, MPAA and others, could shut down its network, forcing KaZaA to find another delivery system).

But even stopping the growth of the P2P application can’t be accomplished simply by removing it from the KaZaA home page, since it can also be downloaded at other sites, notably CNET. Meanwhile, similar clients Gnutella, Morpheus, Grokster, Gnucleus and LimeWire and still widely available—even in the Netherlands.

CNET’s Download.com reports nearly a million downloads of the KaZaA Desktop 1.3.3 app last week (and nearly 33 million total); Morpheus 1.3 had nearly 1.5 million downloads last week, and almost 42 million total. The user base of the top unauthorized apps now reportedly exceeds that of Napster at its peak.

The judge’s response, if any, to KaZaA’s latest announcement has not yet been made public. Meanwhile, the swapping goes on.