RIDING KAZAA TO RICHES:
A BRILLIANT IDEA?
According to a CNET report, advertising/tech company Brilliant Digital Entertainment has figured out a way to piggyback on peer-to-peer applications like KaZaA. The idea is to use the computing power and connectivity of P2P user communities to distribute the 3D ads Brilliant creates—as well as virtually any other content—or perhaps to broker processing resources, much as Enron brokers energy. When its chief execs aren’t handpicking Department of Energy officials, of course.
The software to accomplish this is bundled with the ultra-popular KaZaA, though users allegedly don’t participate in Brilliant’s parasitic network unless they "opt in." For now, anyway. As far as you know.
Participating users would have their computers remotely turned on, and machines with fast connections would form the foundation for the Brilliant network. That’s a chain of millions of computing systems that exists organically and that can be exploited at next to no cost.
While a certain portion of P2P users are reflexively opposed to using anything resembling "spyware" (and believe black helicopters are watching them as they download midget porn), it’s unlikely that the millions of primarily young song-swappers care much about the invisible Brilliant app, which gives new meaning to being a corporate pawn.
Interestingly, it was Brilliant CEO Kevin Bermeister who hooked up KaZaA’s previous owners, Dutch company Fast Track BV, with Australian outfit Sharman Networks, which bought KaZaA’s assets.
Bermeister is also using the programming resources to develop a new peer-to-peer venture, which bears the same name as the software now bundled with KaZaA: Altnet.
In the meantime, plans are afoot to activate the KaZaA-supported, Brilliant-operated network soon. "Everybody will get turned on in more or less a simultaneous fashion," Bermeister told CNET’s John Borland.
Yeah, sure. That’s what they told us before that party in Brentwood, but the blue pills barely did anything.
Neither Brilliant nor Sharman has yet been named in the copyright infringement suit against Fast Track filed by the RIAA and MPAA, Borland reports. But it’s not inconceivable that a firm profiting from such a network could be targeted for contributory infringement claims.
