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 The palpable
dishonesty of all parties in the file-swapping wars is more entertaining
than any disk ever cut by Madonna.
A particularly contemptible example came to light last week. One popular
music swapping product, Kazaa, has earned a bad reputation among some users,
because it installs obnoxious "adware" programs onto their computers.
This adware keeps flinging up unwanted advertisements at inopportune moments,
and people hated it. So some enterprising software hacker created Kazaa
Lite, a clone of the original program with the adware removed.
Kazaa’s parent company, Sharman Networks, has never shown much regard for
the copyrights of others, but its own intellectual property is a different
matter. As rockers Guns N’ Roses sang, "You can have anything you
want, but you better not take it from me." In this spirit, Sharman’s
attorneys contacted the Internet search service Google to demand that they
remove all links to Web sites offering downloads of Kazaa Lite, because
the cloned product violates Kazaa’s copyrights.
Hiwatha Bray in the Boston Globe
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