Belated Merry Xmas To All & Happy New Years Wishes

[GhostShip]

Its that time of year again folks where the fine and upstanding staff of the site here bid you a fine end to your Xmas and a great start to the new year that's just about around the corner, we all look forward to continue doing what we do most of the year and that's to provide a community meeting point and information exchange for all of you who still enjoy using WinMX and its features and on that note I would like you to remember those who make it all happen here by providing their services to you all.

Without the team of behind the scenes folks who keep this place rolling in so many different ways I can guarantee you it would not be here at all so lets hear a big hand for those who selflessly take care of this our community place and please join with me in thanking them all, I would especially like to thank the two very generous staffers who provide the server here for the site to operate from and the other members of staff who keep other sites and backup facilities at the ready, its no understatement to say we rely on such kind and generous people and while I don't wish to name them I would like to make sure you all know that there are such folks doing this for you all and with well deserved pride, we are lucky to have such folks on board.

This year has seen a bit of a downturn in the userbase and there are many reasons for this but as always there are things we can do to reverse this trend, currently many of our newer users are led here by the current regular users so on the word of mouth front we are gaining ... however on the general publicity around the web front we are not doing so well it may because many folks feel that they cant take on other network users who make claims that just don't cut the mustard when looked at objectively but if we are to stay strong and united we must at least make the effort to bring our favourite p2p app to their attention do not do so is to create a self fulfilling prophecy of doom, lets no fade out from apathy.

I,m not one to beat around the bush so I,ll say this pretty bluntly, this year has been a rather quiet and lacklustre one for most of you and for sure most of us for a variety of reasons and while there's no single cause for it there's certainly a cure, instead of wondering about what others are doing jump forward and try creating some activities yourselves , I,m sure most of you know I didn't just fall into being one of the loudest voices on this site, it took a lot of time and trust building even before this actual site was created and its taken a long time to build up to what it is today, however like your homes it needs a tidy up now and then and folks have to be around to change the drapes and carpets, sure we can all sit by asking who is going to do this and that but the alternative of offering to help or better still making it happen all by yourself is the real spirit that we have tried to pass on to you all. Many of the staff are worn out and tired, they have worked hard and then worked harder to keep what is an ever sprawling mass of community material here for you to locate and as the sites gotten larger so has the duties they all perform.

You all know the solution I,m seeking here, lets stop becoming cabbages that seek entertainment on a plate and generate some of our own material both on the network to share and on the site here to enliven this place, there is much we can do as a community and lesser amounts of things we can do as a few folks pulling a larger cart, who will help pull our cart this year to help bring some relief to those already worn out from doing so ?

That's my challenge for this new year coming, if you want to offer ideas or time or simply to look at improving the organisation of what we already offer lets please hear from you as a dead community is no community and having all fought so long to preserve the base of our community I would be remiss in allowing it to expire without at least a call to arms.

On a final note here I would like to make a quick mention of those who have passed away this year and why WinMX is so important to me, what many of you may not understand is that a percentage of your fellow users are folks trapped at home all day with serious health complaints or psychological issues that in the real world would mark them out for ridicule or harassment or even unwanted pity, by using WinMX to chat with friends such victims of fate regain both a sense of purpose and belonging, all are equal here and the colour of anyone's skin is irrelevant, by our collective will to enforce standards of common respect and decency we have kept this a great place to be and a home to many tens of thousands of educated chatters, folks will pass away as nature intended but lets look not at that which is now lost but the quality time our lost friends gave already and remember those great days, we too will join the "choir invisible" one day and I hope we have at least passed along our WinMX spirit of community and fast collective action when treated unjustly, be proud of our community folks and lets all look forward to an exciting albeit challenging new year.

[White Stripes]

since i know you know at least most of the problems with MX i'll just put it this way.... bondo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bondo_(putty)) and tack welds only work for so long...

as for new content... i really doubt (as an example) http://vo.do will have a copy of winmx running...

winmx is a niche program whose niche is getting smaller and smaller as the years go on...

and no im not trying to rain on the parade... im just being realistic...

[GhostShip]

I too enjoy being realistic and to be honest your not comparing like with like in your example above, we do indeed have a niche share of folks time but the point is we need not spend our time looking to see what WinMX cant do but instead to look at seeing what it does do and how we can improve on that, I could go on for ages about the drawbacks of other p2p systems and yet will that gain us anything or aid us to steer the good ship WinMX on to some sort of future, frankly I dont feel it will and so even if the userbase shrunk to 100 users I would be happier knowing I wasnt sitting idle or doing nothing when theres still very much in the way of opportunities if we but keep trying to act and think positively instead of simply giving up, anyone can give up the battle ,the real hereos out there are the ones who make changes and change minds to keep our community something envied by many, sure its not the worlds greatest network but it sure beats most other chat capable filesharing networks hands down.

[Pri]

I've tried to get news sites to run pieces on us but they aren't interested until we have something new to show. That was the response from TorrentFreak at-least. I've started a Minecraft Server called Renegades which bridges my WinMX community and Minecraft together. To give you some ideas of this traffic sharing, my Minecraft server gains roughly 20 new users per day and about 1/4th of those will visit my site which is full of WinMX related information.

I've released lots of plugins to keep hosts interested in running rooms and I've released not just useful / fun tools (like IMDB or Wikipedia lookups) but functional stuff to help admins manage rooms easier so it doesn't feel like a burden to run a room (Proxy Blocker, Pulse Protection).

Others who are members of my room have setup official WinMX Facebook and Twitter accounts to direct users towards WinMX.

Basically what I'm saying is I'm trying, my users are trying. And although we are personally seeing results in our own room which has had great success every year since it began we aren't having a measured impact overall for WinMX as a whole. Whilst my room gains users WinMX itself is losing users.

We need to come up with some kind of campaign if this is going to survive. Something we can produce and push to the userbase to promote. It doesn't have to be complicated just something as simple as a Facebook group that all our WinMX Facebook users can join and then bring their friends in. We need something to make WinMX seem like a good competitor to other file sharing services. Play on the social aspect for example.

I don't wanna see WinMX go as I really like it and I do have a lot of time invested in it with the software I've produced, but on the other hand maybe it's just about time it died I mean if users don't want it there isn't much we can do about that, this is how capitalism works if people want something it survives and if they don't it dies. I'm hopeful for a new client but I fear it will not bring WinMX far enough in to the future for it to have any impact, user habbits have changed and many are now using Bittorrent. Even IRC's DCC has been dwarfed and left redundant by Bittorrent uptake and almost all private Bittorrent sites have IRC channels to supplement file sharing with conversation. And I don't know about you guys but it's a lot easier browsing files on a web page than it is in a WinMX search window, most sites now even have IMDB data right in the webpage for movies with screenshots to show the quality before you download, that is hard to compete with and I think that alone will lose us the most technical of users.

anyway I'm rambling so I'll stop this. Merry Christmas and a happy new year all 

[GhostShip]

I cant see sites that offer such services and base their whole effort to aiding copyright infringement have any defence against law suits Pri, we on the other hand have bent over backwards to ensure we are not part of any such activity and its this refusal to become a "man in the middle" that's kept us providing support as we do without spurious claims of liability, we can all name torrent sites that have fallen by the wayside and will continue to do so, its pretty short sighted to look at one model simply because its currently popular and yet so insecure, the concept of mass participation in a network works just as well for winmx with its multiple download facility as it does bit torrent and to date no one has been able to show any speed settings in a windows socket that would make BT any faster with a single seed than winmx can offer, having multiple srcs provides the big speed boost and that seems to be the reasoning behind nearly all cases of claimed speed increases.

What I,m trying to point out here is that we can change and we can innovate but if we are just going to follow the network of sheep then we have nothing to offer, that's not a premise that we can build on or go anywhere with, we all know about BT users being sued for thousands of dollars each, and we all know no one using WinMX  has been tackled for so much as a penny, as long as that remains the case its pretty reckless to point folks to a model based on automatic infringement if the file is copyrighted, have we all forgotten that its uploading and not downloading that is cited in all cases as infringement and thus downloaders are 100% safer on such a non symmetrical network ?

I am finding it pretty concerning that the only folks bothering to reply in this thread are those nay-saying WinMX in favour of other networks, has support for the network dropped so low that only two ppl who use BT more than winmx are interested in replying ?

[Pri]

I cant see sites that offer such services and base their whole effort to aiding copyright infringement have any defence against law suits Pri, we on the other hand have bent over backwards to ensure we are not part of any such activity and its this refusal to become a "man in the middle" that's kept us providing support as we do without spurious claims of liability, we can all name torrent sites that have fallen by the wayside and will continue to do so, its pretty short sighted to look at one model simply because its currently popular and yet so insecure, the concept of mass participation in a network works just as well for winmx with its multiple download facility as it does bit torrent and to date no one has been able to show any speed settings in a windows socket that would make BT any faster with a single seed than winmx can offer, having multiple srcs provides the big speed boost and that seems to be the reasoning behind nearly all cases of claimed speed increases.

Users don't care about the operators of the torrent sites. One goes down another pops up and they can get files again. And besides torrent sites don't actually serve downloads they just facilitate two people to share data. And that is what we do, primary users are facilitating connections between other users all the time for example, and peercaches give unconnected clients information about other clients to get connected. But again users don't care about the legal ramifications that network operators may face they just care about files.

And I also just want to point out that your WinMX vs Bittorrent speed comparison is false. If you have 10 sharers on both networks with the same upload speed and then 5 users who want a file shared by those 10 users begin a download of said file the Bittorrent one will finish first as the downloaders will each share data with eachother whilst on WinMX the downloaders will all have the same amount of data. This is due to WinMX serving downloads sequentially (start to finish) where as Bittorrent cuts downloads up in to Chunks and shares those chunks based on availability. Meaning Downloader 1 is seeking different chunks to Downloader 2, and then those two downloaders can each share their parts between them whilst still gaining new chunks from others. Thus if WinMX had as many peers as Bittorrent it would still be slower unless a new protocol was devised which basically used the Bittorrent method (which without disputing you, you say is unsafe)

I'm not trying to argue I'm just saying the truth here. The only time Bittorrent and WinMX are on a level playing field in file transfers is when there is only 1 downloader. As soon as you add 2 or more downloaders Bittorrent becomes faster than the WinMX model.

What I,m trying to point out here is that we can change and we can innovate but if we are just going to follow the network of sheep then we have nothing to offer, that's not a premise that we can build on or go anywhere with, we all know about BT users being sued for thousands of dollars each, and we all know no one using WinMX  has been tackled for so much as a penny, as long as that remains the case its pretty reckless to point folks to a model based on automatic infringement if the file is copyrighted, have we all forgotten that its uploading and not downloading that is cited in all cases as infringement and thus downloaders are 100% safer on such a non symmetrical network ?

If your uploading copyrighted content anywhere you're taking a risk. Obscurity isn't Security. It may make us feel safer believing that on WinMX we are so tiny that no one cares about us and that may be the reality but it's still possible to upload a piece of a file to an investigator and get a letter from your ISP or worse. The fact is we have no protection built in to WinMX to stop an investigator from connecting starting a download and then monitoring the IP Address of the person sharing the file with them. This is how they began the investigation of Jamie Thomas who shared Music on Kazaa which is a very similar P2P application to WinMX.

I am finding it pretty concerning that the only folks bothering to reply in this thread are those nay-saying WinMX in favour of other networks, has support for the network dropped so low that only two ppl who use BT more than winmx are interested in replying ?

I guess so...  

[wonderer]

If I just look to my close by environment, the room I host, I have a very consistent set of visitors and the ones that have left are the ones suffering under the bad economy. Losing a job is hard, but when your computer fails in that circomstance, it is the last thing you will replace for a new one. This sounds weird, but it is yhe reality. The bright side of this is that economy seems to have passed the downslope and this shows me old guests returning in the room one by one. So it shows me that all efforts to keep the network running have not been for nothing. People are returning home. Even the ones that have left WinMx when frontode closed server and did not believe WinMx would survive are showing up.

Now if we only could find sufficient skilled coder, we would be able to fulfill the wishes on renovation. As for now I am just happy we have a large source of information contained in this website and having a slight hope the new year will bring some of the innovation we are all waiting for and some of us are working hard on.
The ones that think this will bring a great break through in our user base will be disappointed as that will not happen overnight.

We should all be gratefull to the few that spend hours of freetime and put their money in the WinMx network. These few are the ones keeping WinMx alive. So thank you for what you did in the past and are going to do in the future.

Happy new year to all of you

@Pri
bittorrent is at most as fast as WinMx as mulipoint download is limited by sources and most of all and not unimportant by your bandwidth
 

[Will]

One of the reasons we shouldn't do campaigns and such is that the WinMX client is still the property of Frontcode and if we start to campaign and they decide to get nasty about it then things could go horribly wrong. On the bright side, when we have an alternate client we can do all the campaigning we like and maybe even make some modifications to the protocol to fix a few things and make improvements.

"The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg, not by smashing it."--
Arnold H. Glasgow

[Bluey_412]

There are problems with flooders, with still unprotected Primaries (some of which i suspect are deliberately set up by cartel participants) but worst of all, with non-sharers, folks with big(or small) libraries who wanna q and take, q and take, but never give.

A Cultural thing, as referred to by Pri with his 'People only interested in files'?  I dunno, but education of some kind is needed.

Furthermore, someone might wanna kick my butt for suggesting, but i think Loyalty, Faithfulness, is a huge factor.  Why ARE we sitting here championing WinMX out of one side of our mouths and then preaching Torrents out of the other?

Time and time again in chatrooms, i see 'Ohh, I haven't used winmx to download for years' or words to that effect.  Where the F...'s the loyalty???

Such internal Hypocrisy will not do us any good at all.

USE THE DAMNED PROGRAM, THATS WHY YOU ARE HERE!!!!!!!!

[White Stripes]

@Pri
bittorrent is at most as fast as WinMx as mulipoint download is limited by sources and most of all and not unimportant by your bandwidth

what hes arguing is not the overall throughput speed (the K/s number next to the file) but the efficiency of the transfer method.... you get a lot more data for your K/s on BT than winmx...


as far as a bittorent style transfer system for winmx a method similar to what ares uses would be perfect -- queue for nonlinear slices at a time rather than the whole file,  this wouldnt be that far fetched to do in a clone client... would at least put a big dent in the 'neverending queue' problem winmx has had even in its prime (quickmx was a handy toy back then).....


and now for some torrent sites;
http://vo.do -- legal; creative commons
http://www.jamendo.com -- legal; creative commons
http://www.publicdomaintorrents.net -- legal; public domain

those arent going anywhere methinks.... p2p does not = illegal

on a lark i fired up winmx to search for the vodo/bittorrent funded 'pioneer one' ... i got one result (first episode) from one source...

and on a personal note...

winmx used to be king for music videos -- esp anime music videos .... but youtube took the regular music video and -- you guessed it http://www.animemusicvideos.org 'reclaimed' those two spots...

as for music --- well... just give this;  http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/347 a listen (creative commons --- legal download --- available in mp3 and vorbis)

beats the hell out of whats on the radio.... and winmx has also lost its 'odd/obscure' music position as well... just... cant find it... the creative commons types are the 'high experimenters' anymore; http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/binaerpilot

used to be able to find mod/xm/s3m/it format music too (demoscene) ... no results there either...

i started out with winmx version 3.30 finding all kinds of odd goodies... now... i dont even know what niche winmx fills anymore....

but the nostalgic bastard in me keeps holding on to... something... here even tho i rarely run winmx anymore.... (if i had the bandwidth id leave it running for uploads so that maybe someone would, for example, come across binarpilots 'Widibf')

Do you like computers
Do you like to dance
Do you like crazy rhythms
Do you hate fucking trance
Do you hate pop culture, and what it does to your head
Grab a beer, go online, rock with me instead...
('lyrics' to 'widibf')



.....well that was depressing....    ....but therapeutic... lol

as for those who chat... i never used the chat system of winmx till after the shutdown... but im still not a big fan of it... have always been an IRC user...

[Pri]

There are problems with flooders, with still unprotected Primaries (some of which i suspect are deliberately set up by cartel participants) but worst of all, with non-sharers, folks with big(or small) libraries who wanna q and take, q and take, but never give.

A Cultural thing, as referred to by Pri with his 'People only interested in files'?  I dunno, but education of some kind is needed.

Furthermore, someone might wanna kick my butt for suggesting, but i think Loyalty, Faithfulness, is a huge factor.  Why ARE we sitting here championing WinMX out of one side of our mouths and then preaching Torrents out of the other?

Time and time again in chatrooms, i see 'Ohh, I haven't used winmx to download for years' or words to that effect.  Where the F...'s the loyalty???

Such internal Hypocrisy will not do us any good at all.

USE THE DAMNED PROGRAM, THATS WHY YOU ARE HERE!!!!!!!!

When I said users just care about files I meant they care about files more than the legality of what they are doing and the legal ramifications for any site operators.

And if WinMX was a great download service I would totally use it. But it just isn't. I share my butt off, I always have open slots + I run MXM (I no longer run the 0of0 hack). But if I wanted to get files from it myself, aka download and not just share the files I already have I'd be hitting brick walls constantly both from a lack of content, lack of users to share content fast and a lack of consistency.

I love TV, I download a lot of TV. Sometimes a single show can be 30 to 80GB in size. This would take a lifetime to procure every episode on WinMX not just because files aren't linked together in groups (cant download every episode in one go) but the speed is slower and you have no idea what quality the show is. Some episodes could be from DVD's some could be from TV Rips and if they are TV Rips they could be HDTV, PDTV or 'other' users don't name their files correctly. I love the ones that do but many of these aren't actually naming their own files they are simply leaving the name on the file when they got it either from Bittorrent directly or through another user who got it from Bittorrent and shared it with them.

Again this is just the fact of the situation. If WinMX had what I wanted and it was fast to get and consistent in quality I'd use it. I'm an informed user and I'm only going to use the best, I don't use Bittorrent out of an opinion or personal choice I use it because its the best, it has the most content, the fastest speeds and the highest quality assurance. Not to mention it can serve files over 2GB in size (Love those 1080p 12GB files).

I understand you don't want us to promote Bittorrent but what are we supposed to do? Everyone uses it, it comes up in conversation in my own room at-least once a day. My hands are tied.

[GhostShip]

I think chaps you both make my case for me, if only half the effort put into seeking alternatives was put into delivering some creativity and a positive approach for this community I would be making different types of demands, as you both know our ears are not closed to ideas here and for good reason, we all need to look forward and innovate where possible so some good ideas come from these forum discussions but lets be honest I,m not going to bother with BT just because many sheep do and for the same reason I don't operate a warez server, its just not something I care to use, of course folks do and will continue to use it but like I mentioned already look at the cost of doing so if creates the situation of auto-infringing  copyrighted material, you cant auto-infringe using winmx, its an active choice to do so.

What I haven't heard yet are sensible ideas to sustain the community and its unique flavour, as stated many times if your own actions create the situation you complain of that's called a self fulfilling prophecy as you are part of the cause of your own problem.

Lets hear some out of the box ideas folks, we all gain by sharing our wisdom even when its not obvious what that wisdom is 

[Pri]

I think chaps you both make my case for me, if only half the effort put into seeking alternatives was put into delivering some creativity and a positive approach for this community I would be making different types of demands, as you both know our ears are not closed to ideas here and for good reason, we all need to look forward and innovate where possible so some good ideas come from these forum discussions but lets be honest I,m not going to bother with BT just because many sheep do and for the same reason I don't operate a warez server, its just not something I care to use, of course folks do and will continue to use it but like I mentioned already look at the cost of doing so if creates the situation of auto-infringing  copyrighted material, you cant auto-infringe using winmx, its an active choice to do so.

What I haven't heard yet are sensible ideas to sustain the community and its unique flavour, as stated many times if your own actions create the situation you complain of that's called a self fulfilling prophecy as you are part of the cause of your own problem.

Lets hear some out of the box ideas folks, we all gain by sharing our wisdom even when its not obvious what that wisdom is  

I already gave you ideas. I told you what me and my community are doing. We have Facebook and Twitter accounts for WinMX, we have a Minecraft Server where we are roping users in (new users who have never used WinMX before) I suggested some kind of official Facebook group that could be started and promoted on the site here to engage our current WinMX users to share WinMX with their friends on Facebook. I've contacted News websites to get them to run stories on WinMX.

These are all out of the box ideas for getting more users, if you haven't heard them as you just said then you aren't listening.

[GhostShip]

No need to get irate Pri, as I posted above I,m always listening and I,m sure there's plenty of scope for yet more ideas 

[White Stripes]

you cant auto-infringe using winmx

..click 'browse'...

[Pri]

Well I'm not exactly irate but I'm a little disgruntled when you say you've not heard any sensible ideas when I gave like 4 sensible ideas already, all of which I've carried out, and a 5th idea that we could move forward on (The Facebook Group). I just feel like if any of us say the word Bittorrent the rest of what we say is forgotten.

You need to get over this "Bittorrent is Evil" thing because it is our only competitor. It is everyones competitor if you are distributing 1's and 0's on the internet outside of a Webpage then you are competing with Bittorrent. We can't just walk around like it doesn't exist, we need to identify its strengths and weaknesses and overcome those.

For example..

Bittorrent Strengths that WinMX Lacks:
 - Files are presented on easily navigational and searchable webpages with lots of metadata (Ratings, Reviews, Screenshots, Comments from other users etc)
 - Downloads are fast as the protocol is extremely efficient at sharing files
 - Has excellent support for transferring multiple files at once
 - Supports HTTP direct downloads in conjunction with uTP Bittorrent Protocol
 - Supports files of any size, beyond 2GB.

But it has some weaknesses:
 - Anyone in the same swarm can view your IP and what files your downloading
 - You are always sending data to other users as you download it
 - Moving files and keeping them available for others is complicated and almost never done by users as a result
 - Bittorrent is heavily throttled by ISP's due to its prevelance among internet users
 - No chat features
 - Sharing content you already have is complicated and promoting the content to others is also complicated

So as I see it we need a new client with some of Bittorrents features, specifically we need to overcome the 2GB file limit, we need to support HTTP direct transfers (this would be a way for us to get in on people that just want a general downloading app for rapidshare and other such sites that does multi-segment downloading) we need to have some kind of multi-file link file. For example in a WinMX client we could select a folder of files and then click a button to create a .winmx file (example) which is like a .torrent file but for WinMX and this file would contain the file hashes of all the files within that folder and make that hash file available for users to browse and download from you to get all the files to queue automatically. And we can always increase the search result system to include API calls for metadata. Comments on files would be impossible to do without a central server but we could implement other things by using publically accessible API's and having the client software itself query the data it needs to spruce up results pages within the program.

All of this stuff ^ will require a new client. Personally I think we should start over client wise. We all know how poor the WinMX protocol is in regards to bugs and security issues. If we are going to start over anyway we might aswell make a new protocol from scratch, the tools at our disposal have come a long way and I think if we designed a new protocol now we could do it in a much more secure and efficient manner. I'm saying we port the 'look and feel' of WinMX to a brand new codebase with a new protocol and we leave the old v3.5x protocol behind.

[White Stripes]

- Moving files and keeping them available for others is complicated and almost never done by users as a result

feature added to newer mainline and utorrent versions fixes this....

port the 'look and feel' of WinMX to a brand new codebase with a new protocol and we leave the old v3.5x protocol behind.

that big of a leap (instead of a gradual scoot) is going to cause havoc.... read somewhere that getting users to let go of the winmx 2.x series and to move to the 3.x series had to be forced by frontcode due to too many not wanting to let go of 2.x.....

...its where the biggest problem of winmx lies....

[GhostShip]

@Stripes: Browsing is not infringing activity, its simply a list delivered from a winmx primary and a list is not the same as actual file data that is necessary to bring a claim for infringement.

Pri you may have noticed this is a WinMX support forum, do you really expect me of all people to pretend bit torrent is faster in all cases when I know in many cases that's just not the case?
Why you continue to make the claim that bit torrent is faster because its bit torrent is beyond me but perhaps you have some reference data to show why this could be so ?
Data is transferred in blocks and sequential or not the data arrives at the downloader just as fast as it would if they where using a torrent client, if your claiming this is not the case I hope you have some data to back up your claim, winmx is also able to transfer multiple files at once btw

What we agree on thankfully is the need to get ourselves into a more positive position and most of your suggestions have already been mulled over having cropped up in many previous discussions held here and when possible many will come to fruit, my issue for the current time is that the fruit crop is delayed and we need to ensure other aspects of the community are taken care of and improved upon in the meanwhile thus my call for activity and action, doing nothing is not the way ahead I,m sure we all agree.

[White Stripes]

@Stripes: Browsing is not infringing activity, its simply a list delivered from a winmx primary and a list is not the same as actual file data that is necessary to bring a claim for infringement.

tell that to Jammie Thomas-Rasset ...

[GhostShip]

Nice peice of mis-direction theatre Stripes, refer to something that hasnt happened here and pretend kazzaa is WinMX, sure some bits are similar but we all know the real reason she was able to be targetted was because Kazza made a financial deal to save their own asses with the media mafia and paid a lot of money to avoid facing their rap and passed to buck on the all of the users as their settlement was full and final meaning they cant be sued twice.

You also negelected to mention the small problem of her not presenting the original harddrive for inspection and its this single fact thats always stood her in bad light, at one time she was offered a $25,000 full and final settlement but decided to go for all or nothing and unfortunately seemed to get the "all "part of the courts decision.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_v._Thomas

The facts in most cases such as this are often twisted and warped by whichever party is making a claim but we know a few facts, kazza is not winmx and no one using winmx has been sued, unlike kazza BT Napster Limewire and a host of other networks, cut the cake how you want but the facts are clear.