- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
and btw any kind of file sharing is now illegal the supreme court declared it a few eeks ago
Not true. There are companies using bit torrent to dowload their software to people. Linspire is an excellent example, recently using bit torrent and fileshare technology in an effort to promote Linspire 5, an upgrade of their OS.
It is illegal to download copyrighted material without consent now. it wasn't always so. the original wording of the file sharing law made it illegal for people to upload documents, or share them, to other people. It was not illegal to download these files. Example: you download a copy of i-robot using P2P fikesharing, but you move the file to a non-shared folder or burn it to disc and then delete it from the drive completely. That was legal under the old system because you didn't turn around and "share" the file you just recieved with others.
Now it's not. But I doubt this is the last we've heard on the P2P front. as more companies use the technology to legitimatly distribute their goods, it's another slap in the face of high end retail and marketing. The ads are right: filesharing, in any form hurts these businesses. it gives people another choice, and it gives smaller companies a power on par with the big guys when it comes to marketting. In a nutshell: why sign away all your rights to a record company when you can massdistribute your CD on the web? Why buy several thousand dollars worth of bandwidth for your game site or hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to get it on the shelves at EB games when you can just sell people a 10K CD text key and send them to bit torrent to get the actual program?
BTW: I use filesharing on one of my PCs. It's never damaged my computer. For most Linux apps, it's the best way to find them...and fan sub anime; don't forget fansubs...
But I don't recommend Kazaa, or anything even closly related(like Bearshare). Kazaa is a spyware factory, and not well maintained.
How is it that your filesharing adversly affected the running of Halo? if the program was running, then Kazaa would have been eating bandwidth right and left. but if the app is down, it shouldn't be a problem.
[Edited on 9/21/2005]