Travis Kalanick is lecturing in my class

[Guest Spicy McHaggis]

Dude sold Scour for $9 million.

 

What should I ask him tomorrow?

[Guest DrTom]

Why he thinks Napster ended up being a bunch of cowards? They could have fought the good fight and really done something with the issue of P2P vs. excessive copyright laws, but they folded their tents and faded into the sunset.

 

Also, how he feels the recording and movie industries will continue to respond to P2P.

[Guest Spicy McHaggis]

Certainly.

 

The prof gave us a recent Forbes article that says he's got a new "legit" company company called Red Swoosh that will work for/with recording and movie industries.

[Guest Spicy McHaggis]

Technology

Legalize It

Aliya Sternstein, 02.17.03

 

 

The file-swapping networks plaguing movie and music moguls are starting to figure out how to make a legitimate buck.

 

 

Travis Kalanick likes to surf. For sport he takes to the water outside his Hermosa Beach, Calif. home. For a living he surfs the Web. His first plunge into this business was with a little company called Scour, which knocked off the famous music knockoff site Napster. Scour became one of the most popular MP3 sites on the Web, helping larcenous teenagers get free copies of copyrighted music by sharing files. Scour made its money on advertising.

 

No surprise, music publishers sued Scour two years ago, seeking damages for contributing to copyright infringement. Kalanick settled the case by giving the publishers $1 million for their trouble and agreeing to shut down the site. He also sold Scour for $9 million to CenterSpan Communications (nasdaq: CSCC - news - people ). Kalanick left for Hawaii to surf for a bit.

 

Now the 26-year-old is back with a new company, in Westwood, Calif.: Red Swoosh, which aims to use the same file-sharing technology legitimately. By adding a layer of copy protection and user authentication to his prior application, Kalanick is making nice with the people he once drove mad. "We want to make customers of every one of the 33 litigants in the Scour suit," he says.

 

If you can't beat 'em, hire 'em. Finding it next to impossible to shut down all the Napster-like sites that facilitate illegal copying, Hollywood is trying to make honest businessmen of some of the perpetrators by teaming up on digital distribution of content. Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) has joined forces with Altnet, a mogul-friendly accessory to the notorious Kazaa network. One of Napster's cofounders has launched a movie download service that is in early discussions with MGM (nyse: MGG - news - people ). The once-anarchic creator of Freenet has produced an application to help office workers search one another's hard drives for important memos and documents.

 

The legal battle over the unauthorized copying continues. The music labels shut down Napster and still blame it for their sales slump. The Motion Picture Association of America is suing Kazaa, MusicCity and Grokster in a federal district court in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, operators of some corporate networks are trying to keep file sharing out of the workplace, lest they become entangled in copyright suits or simply lose bandwidth to MP3 frivolity. Home Depot and IBM, for example, ban the peer-to-peer music-sharing technology that Napster used. Companies that upgrade to Windows XP can deploy a new feature that prohibits employees from installing anything on their desktops that would bypass the server.

 

But file sharing is a powerful technology, and its legitimate uses cannot be denied. The beauty of it is that it doesn't require a central server. Users who want a file search among other "peers," scanning all the computers on a network and then swapping bits. The bottleneck at the file server is bypassed.

 

Red Swoosh has signed up such clients as Cable & Wireless and IGN Entertainment (nasdaq: IGNX - news - people ) to download songs, videos and games. As with Kazaa, the Swoosh networks' content comes from disparate PCs near the user that have already installed Swoosh. Data is assembled for download on the fly. But unlike Kazaa, which involves the drudgery of searching through massive file databases and smears your desktop with annoying pop-up ads, Swoosh allows its 1.4 million users to click on a download easily. Its digital-rights-management feature blocks unauthorized users from downloading, encrypts the file while in transit and makes it difficult to burn additional copies.

 

IGN, a gaming fan site, would have to pay a traditional content distribution network about 60 cents to get a 200-megabyte file sent out to a purchaser. Kalanick charges a fixed fee of a few pennies per active user per month, regardless of how much users download. IGN has used Swoosh to promote game hits such as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Kalanick says Swoosh grossed $250,000 in the last three months of 2002 and is on track to do $2.5 million this year.

 

Last October, in its ongoing effort to insinuate itself into Hollywood, Microsoft paid $18,000 to promote Lions Gate Films' coming-of-age movie Rules of Attraction, using the Altnet peer-to-peer service. Altnet happens to be bundled with Kazaa. For a fee, its search technology will push legitimate music files and videogames to the top of Kazaa search queries. Hundreds of games are downloaded on Altnet daily, for $10 to $25. Music files cost users between a dime and a dollar; a 30-day movie license runs up to $4.

 

Even Napster cofounder John Fanning is making a comeback. Fanning, uncle of Shawn Fanning, is chief technology officer and founder of NetMovies, a movie subscription service. The Hull, Mass. company, similar to studio-backed Movielink, is testing its publishing system, which, for $5 a month, will allow viewers to download old classics and purchase new releases, like Bruce Willis' Hart's War. Blockbuster (nyse: BBI - news - people ) is an investor.

 

Ian Clarke, the 26-year-old behind file-swapping service Freenet, is about to enter the corporate world. In March he will launch Locutus Enterprise, an application that wraps a three-piece suit around Freenet's technology. Companies that buy Locutus will enable employees to search for and share work documents by placing them into one of, for example, three folders: one for a work group, one for a department and one for the company. Locutus will transport encrypted PowerPoint presentations, e-mails and Word documents on a system built on Microsoft's .NET.

 

The corporate market is getting other file-swapping schemes. Groove Networks, started by Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie, has won a $50 million investment from Microsoft to promote its document-sharing platform beyond customers such as Bertelsmann AG, Neutrogena and Pfizer. Blue Falcon Networks has legally dealt downloads for years for companies such as Virgin.

 

As file sharing matures into a big business, its proponents will inevitably evolve beyond defending lawsuits to maximizing profits. "I don't have any doubt that in 20 years peer-to-peer will be as ubiquitous as the telephone," says Stephen Griffin, chief executive of StreamCast Networks, creator of the Morpheus peer-to-peer service.

 

http://www.forbes.com/home/free_forbes/200...3/0217/099.html

[Guest I'm That Damn Zzzzz]

Ask him about this:

NetBIOS Abuse by Scour

 

Exposed NetBIOS shares are at risk not only from from malicious crackers, but also from supposedly legitimate entities. A particularly bad example is Scour. Without notice or authorization, Scour deliberately scans Internet addresses looking for certain types of exposed NetBIOS Shares, adding those it finds to its publicly accessible catalog. (Although Scour implies that it does so only after you "join," it also scans addresses that have not "joined.")

Scour has been known to scan from these blocks of network addresses:

209.249.159.0 - 209.249.159.255

216.52.208.0 - 216.52.208.255

 

You may to block access from Scour with a firewall rule (recommended). Direct complaints about Scour to:

The abuse department of your own ISP.

(Scour should be completely blocked to protect all subscribers.)

Abovenet Communications (netblock 209.249.159.0 - 209.249.159.255)

InterNAP Network Services (netblock 216.52.208.0 - 216.52.208.255)

 

(A polite complaint tends to get better results than a demanding one.)

http://cable-dsl.home.att.net/netbios.htm