Kazaa Media Desktop (once capitalized as "KaZaA", but now usually left as "Kazaa") is a peer-to-peer file sharing application using the FastTrack protocol. It is commonly used to exchange mp3 music files and is ( as of 2004) the most popular application for this purpose. It is also increasingly being used to exchange movie files. The official client can be downloaded free of charge and is financed by attached spyware and adware.1 History
Kazaa and the FastTrack protocol are the brainchild of the Scandinavians Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis and were introduced in March 2001 by their Dutch company Consumer Empowerment. It appeared during the end of the first generation of P2P networks – Napster shut down in July of that year.
Its initial userbase was made up of users of the Morpheus program, formerly a client of MusicCity. However, once the official Kazaa client became more widespread, its developers used their ability to automatically update it, changing the protocol in February 20022002 is a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar). 2002 was the first palindromic year since 1991 and the last until 2112. 2002 was also designated: International Year of Ecotourism and Mountains National Science Year in the United Kingdom to shut out Morpheus clients when its developers failed to pay license fees. (Morpheus subsequently became a client of GnutellaGnutella (pronounced with a silent "g") is a distributed software project to create a true peer-to-peer file sharing network, without a central server. History The first client was developed by Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper of Nullsoft, a division of AOL,.)
Like the creators of many similar products, Kazaa's creators have been taken to court by music publishing bodies to restrict its use in the sharing of copyrightA copyright is a form of intellectual property that grants its holder the sole legal right copying their works of original expression, such as a literary work, movie, musical work or sound recording, painting, computer program, or industrial design, for aed material. Consumer Empowerment was taken to court in the Netherlands in 2001 by the Dutch music publishing body, Buma/Stemra . In November 2001, the court ordered Kazaa's owners to take steps to prevent its users from violating copyrights or else pay a heavy fine. Consumer Empowerment responded by selling the Kazaa application to a complicated mesh of offshore companies, primarily Sharman NetworksSharman Networks is a company headquartered in Australia and incorporated in Vanuatu. It owns the rights to the KaZaA file sharing software. It was created for this purpose in 2001 when the original owners of KaZaA were sued in the Netherlands. The CEO of, headquartered in AustraliaAustralia is the sixth-largest country in the world (geographically), the only one to occupy an entire continent, and the largest in the region of Australasia. Australia includes the island of Tasmania, which is an Australian State. Its neighbouring count and incorporated in VanuatuThe Republic of Vanuatu is a country located in the South Pacific Ocean. The archipelago is located some 1,750 km east of Australia, 500 km north-east of New Caledonia, west of Fiji and south of the Solomon Islands. Its colonial name, New Hebrides, is no.
A court of appeal in late March 2002 reversed the earlier judgement, stating that Kazaa was not responsible for the actions of its users. However, in 2002, Sharman was sued in Los Angeles by the RIAAThe Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a special interest group representing the US recording industry, and the body responsible for certifying gold and platinum albums and singles in the USA. For more information about sales data see Lis and the MPAAThe Motion Picture Association of America MPAA is a non-profit trade association formed to advance the interests of movie studios. Its members consist of seven major studios: the Walt Disney Company, Sony Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures,. That lawsuit is still pending. Sharman responded with an antitrust countersuit, claiming that the major music labels had conspired to shut out Sharman's secure music distribution service based on Altnet. The suit was dismissed in July 2003. Sharman further claimed that it couldn't be sued in California as it lacked substantial contacts with the state; this claim was also dismissed in July 2003.
In September 2003, the RIAA filed suit in civil court against several private individuals who had shared large numbers of files with Kazaa; most of these suits were settled with small monetary payments. As a result, traffic on the FastTrack network has decreased about 10-15%. Sharman networks responded with a lawsuit against the RIAA, alleging that the terms of use of the network were violated and that unauthorized client software (such as Kazaa Lite, see below) was used in the investigation to track down the individual file sharers. An effort to throw out this suit was denied in January 2004.
In February 2004, the Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA) announced its own legal action against Kazaa, alleging massive copyright breaches. The organization's chief piracy investigator said "This is the largest copyright infringement case in Australia", "these people are the largest infringers of copyright in the world", and added that their operation is "based almost entirely on illegal traffic."
