Ooooooh, I love this! Australia’s apcmag.com has been diligently following Kazaagate, a civil trial now going on in Sydney’s Federal Court. Today, reporter Garth Montgomery reports on a whopper of a confidential document that Kazaa’s owners tried to suppress:
It’s a philosophical rant from [Sharman CTO Philip] Morle, which is printed and packaged to resemble a legitimate academic text, complete with footnotes and the longest title in the history of quasi-academia.
In it, Morle acknowledges what any PC support professional has known for years: Kazaa is riddled with adware and will turn your computer into a doorstop:
“We need to be careful with user resources. Most obvious is in the adware we add to their machine upon installation. This software slows down users’ machines and can affect other activity such as browsing the Internet (as we have seen with PerfectNav). It is reasonable that we show ads in order to create our free software, but I do not believe it is reasonable to place a user in a position where this free software will also make their machine sluggish. Consider how many people that work for Sharman Networks and its partners that hate installing Kazaa on their machines.”
Yep, the people who work for the company that makes Kazaa don’t want it on their computers because it’s such a viper’s nest. Lawsuits are an essential tool, sometimes the only way, to get confirmation of how a company really works as opposed to what it claims to be doing. That was true in the Microsoft antitrust trials and it’s certainly true here.
If you know someone who still uses Kazaa or Grokster, do them a favor and do whatever it takes to help them get rid of it. They’ll thank you.
Ed Bott 
Whatever happened to ‘eating your own dogfood’?
But I quite agree with your point – friends don’t let friends use Kazaa. There’s a growing collection of spyware- and adware-free peer-to-peer programs that offer better results and performance than Kazaa which we should be using.
I do have a friend who still uses Kazaa and she stubbornly refuses to use any other P2P client or consider bittorrent. It freaks me out that she hasn’t been sued yet, since she passes music on it all the time. When direct evidence can’t dissuade a person, I give up.
It freaks you out that she hasn’t been sued yet but it shouldn’t. She probably has a greater chance of being hit by lightning than to end up as one of the statistically extremely rare individuals who are actually sued. The fear of a lawsuit is what the music industry is hoping will drive traffic away when the actual likelihood is next to nil. Slashdot covered this a while back. It should no more freak you out that she doesn’t get sued than that she doesn’t win the lottery.
Kazaa is a nightmare. Personally I don’t really use it. In addition to the spyware/adware the quality of the content on the service just is not predictable. I might get a clean .mp3 track or I might get a bogus dupe file that the RIAA has flooded of a reoccurring 20-second loop of the song or just static. The metadata is all screwed up typically and it’s just not the way that I want to manage my digital library.
I will make an exception every now and again if I need to go on there to find a rare cover version of a song or a live version or some other type of out of print file that I could not buy even if I wanted to. Even then I keep the app on an entirely different PC than the main ones that I use. And of course I’m using Kazaa Lite which strips out much of the spyware.
Buying a track with DRM appeals even less to me than the screwed up metadata I get with Kaaza. This is why I still go out and buy my own CDs and rip them myself into crystal clear, properly meta marked, DRM free, high bit rate .mp3 files. In my opinion, this still is the best way to go for the serious music collector.