How come napster was prosectuted for copyright but programs like Kazaa can still operate?
Napster was located in the US and was the first major target of the RIAA’s anit-P2P litigation efforts. Kazaa is not located in the US, making some anti-piracy efforts murky. However, Kazaa also made efforts to distinguish itself from napster by attempting to limit the distribution of copyrighted materials on its networks. Limewire is an interface to a network using the Gnutella protocol, which is a decetralized P2P protocol written by the creators of Winamp. Limewire (and other Gnutella clients) operates by connecting users directly to other users rather than to a single set of servers. This makes shutting down those networks considerable harder. The same decentralized philosophy used in Limewire is also used in Bittorrent, however Bittorrent requires that a user upload as he or she is downloading. Also, Bittorrent has been embraced by the Open Source community as a legitimate tool for legally distributing software.
