Speaking with RatFaced, one of the Kazaa Lite forum moderators today and our contact at K-Lite, I have uncovered news that the Kazaa Lite K++ project has been shut down by Sharman Networks on grounds of copyright infringement.
The project, which had been set up to block spy and ad ware within the Kazaa Media Desktop Program has achieved notoriety within the P2p world through its simplistic approach and success in reverse engineering the Kazaa application.
However, the program infringed on the copyright of Sharman Networks, the company that now own and program the Kazaa Media Desktop application, after the purchase of the code and copyright in 2002. The FastTrack (Kazaa) network is financed through advertising systems, which Kazaa Lite K++ does not include, and so was seen as a threat by the owners.
Sharman have threatened legal action, and ordered that the offending content be removed from the official Kazaa Lite sites, including http://www.kazaalite.tk/ which now contains no reference to the existance of the application.
RatFaced said that the decision was “Ironic, that Kazaa is complaining about copyright issues, especially as K-Lite ++ stands for everything that Kazaa CLAIMS to stand for... but fails to deliver.”
We will perhaps never see Kazaa Lite again, but we can hope that users will remain aware of the spyware that is hidden inside the Kazaa application, which is used to finance the creation of the software.
eMule and WinMX offer spyware-free alternatives to Kazaa.
The project, which had been set up to block spy and ad ware within the Kazaa Media Desktop Program has achieved notoriety within the P2p world through its simplistic approach and success in reverse engineering the Kazaa application.
However, the program infringed on the copyright of Sharman Networks, the company that now own and program the Kazaa Media Desktop application, after the purchase of the code and copyright in 2002. The FastTrack (Kazaa) network is financed through advertising systems, which Kazaa Lite K++ does not include, and so was seen as a threat by the owners.
Sharman have threatened legal action, and ordered that the offending content be removed from the official Kazaa Lite sites, including http://www.kazaalite.tk/ which now contains no reference to the existance of the application.
RatFaced said that the decision was “Ironic, that Kazaa is complaining about copyright issues, especially as K-Lite ++ stands for everything that Kazaa CLAIMS to stand for... but fails to deliver.”
We will perhaps never see Kazaa Lite again, but we can hope that users will remain aware of the spyware that is hidden inside the Kazaa application, which is used to finance the creation of the software.
eMule and WinMX offer spyware-free alternatives to Kazaa.