Kazaa Lite

» see kazaalite.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Installing Kazaa in 2002 meant installing several other things you had not asked for. Cydoor served the advertising that paid for it. Altnet used your machine and your upstream bandwidth to distribute files somebody else had chosen. Under those sat a browser toolbar and a piece of software that rewrote how your machine resolved domain names, plus a few passengers nobody has ever fully counted. Kazaa Lite was the same program with all of that taken out.

It appeared in April 2002, built by people working under handles rather than by any company. The work was done on the Kazaa Media Desktop binary itself: the same FastTrack network and the same search results, with the advertising and the bundled software removed. Later builds shipped with K++, a memory patcher written by someone calling himself Random Nut, which went further and changed how the client behaved out on the network.

Kazaa scored every user with a participation level, a number between 0 and 1000 derived from how much you uploaded against how much you took, and a low score pushed you down the queue at every busy source. K++ pinned that number at 1000 permanently and lifted the cap on how many results a search could return. Whether that counted as theft or as repair depended on which end of the network you were standing at, and almost everybody was standing at the same end.

File sharing in an internet cafe in Turkey in 2003 was not something you installed, it was something you found already installed. The machine in front of you had been set up once and then used by a few hundred people, and what was on it was whatever the owner had put there and never cleaned off. At home on a dial-up line the calculation ran differently and pointed the same way. A client that quietly handed your upstream to a stranger's transfer was not an ethical question on a 56k connection. It was the entire connection.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what else got installed ~

The list StopBadware published in 2006 is the clearest record of what the official client was carrying. Cydoor and the RX Toolbar went down as spyware. B3D and TopSearch were adware. InstaFinder and New.net rewrote where the browser went, and Altnet sat underneath the lot of it running its own distribution network on your bandwidth. Seven separate pieces of software, none of them chosen, several of them still running after you uninstalled Kazaa.

Sharman Networks was never especially shy about this. The bundle was the business and the free client was the delivery mechanism, which is a coherent arrangement as long as nobody removes the bundle. What the modified builds took away was not the copyright infringement, which carried on exactly as before. It was the revenue. That is the part worth holding onto when the takedown letters start.

~ what k++ patched ~

K++ was a loader that patched the running process in memory rather than the file on disk, which made it awkward to detect and easy to reapply after an update. It pinned the participation level and lifted the search limit, and a single download could pull from more sources at once. In practice a Kazaa Lite user got better transfer speeds than a well-behaved Kazaa user, which is a strange thing to be able to say about a program with no price on it.

The versions people remember are the 2.x line, ending at Kazaa Lite 2.4.3, built on Kazaa Media Desktop 2.0.2. A separate branch called K-Lite tracked the later official client as far as 2.7.2 and added filtering for the fake files the record industry had begun flooding onto the network. Neither branch had a company behind it or any way to make money, and both were mirrored from wherever anybody would host them.

~ the letters ~

On 11 August 2003 Sharman Networks sent Google a request to remove every link to Kazaa Lite from its index. That was the opening move, and the argument was copyright: the modified client contained Sharman's own code, redistributed without permission. A company then facing the record industry in the United States and in Australia was invoking the same body of law against the users who had cleaned up its installer.

The real campaign came four months later. Through December 2003 Sharman contacted the hosts and the upstream providers of every site distributing the program, and on 7 December almost all of them went dark at once, including the links on Kazaa Lite's own front page. There was no lawsuit and no court to appeal to. A letter to an ISP was enough, because nobody involved had a legal department or any reason to find out how far the claim would actually go.

~ what kazaa did next ~

Copies never fully stopped circulating. Resurrection builds turned up through 2004, Sharman filed another removal request with Google in March 2005, and old versions kept being passed around long after they had stopped working properly against the live network. What finished it was the network underneath going quiet.

Sharman settled with the major labels on 27 July 2006, agreeing to pay 100 million dollars and to turn Kazaa into a licensed subscription service. The last official release, version 3.2.7, shipped on 26 November 2006, and by August 2012 the website had stopped answering. The cracked client outlived the argument that produced it and then went the same way, which is what happens to a patch that depends on the thing it patches.

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