Do you still use Kazaa? Options

[tofumonzter]

Do you still use Kazaa or those Peer-2-Peer software?

The servers are in Denmark. The software is in Estonia. The domain is registered Down Under, the corporation on a tiny island in the South Pacific. The users - 60 million of them - are everywhere around the world. The next Napster? Think bigger. And pity the poor copyright cops trying to pull the plug.

By Todd Woody

On October 2, 2001, the weight of the global entertainment industry came crashing down on Niklas Zennström, cofounder of Kazaa, the wildly popular file-sharing service. That was the day every major American music label and movie studio filed suit against his company. Their goal was to shutter the service and shut down the tens of millions of people sharing billions of copyrighted music, video, and software files. Only problem: Stopping Napster, which indexed songs on its servers, was easy - the recording industry took the company to court for copyright infringement, and a judge pulled the plug. With Kazaa, users trade files through thousands of anonymous "supernodes." There is no plug to pull.


Michele Aboud
Nikki Hemming, CEO of Sharman Networks, contracted by LEF Interactive, owner of Kazaa. 
Nor, as attorneys would soon discover, was there even a single outfit to shut down. That's because on a January morning three months after the suit was filed, Amsterdam-based Kazaa.com went dark and Zennström vanished. Days later, the company was reborn with a structure as decentralized as Kazaa's peer-to-peer service itself. Zennström, a Swedish citizen, transferred control of the software's code to Blastoise, a strangely crafted company with operations off the coast of Britain - on a remote island renowned as a tax haven - and in Estonia, a notorious safe harbor for intellectual property pirates. And that was just the start.

Ownership of the Kazaa interface went to Sharman Networks, a business formed days earlier in the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, another tax haven. Sharman, which runs its servers in Denmark, obtained a license for Zennström's technology, FastTrack. The Kazaa.com domain, on the other hand, was registered to an Australian firm called LEF Interactive - for the French revolutionary slogan, liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Confused? So were the copyright cops. "It's hard to know which one to sue," complains Michael Speck, an investigator with the Australian Record Industry Association. Hollywood lawyers figured the best way to bring Kazaa to justice was to squeeze Sharman. Trouble was, Sharman, which operates out of Sydney, had no employees. All its workers, including CEO Nikki Hemming, are contracted through LEF. The names of Sharman's investors and board members are locked away in Vanuatu, a republic that bills itself as an asylum whose "strict code of secrecy" is "useful in any number of circumstances where the confidentiality of ownership, or control, want to be preserved."

Why all the subterfuge? It's an international business model for the post-Napster era. A close look at Kazaa reveals a corporate nesting doll that frustrated Hollywood attorneys for more than a year. From Estonia to Australia, they pleaded with courts to force Kazaa's operators out from the shadows. Meanwhile, every week that Sharman was able to hold the law at bay, countless copies of Kazaa software were being downloaded. In the last six months alone, PC users have downloaded more than 90 million copies. Kazaa has 60 million users around the world and 22 million in the US - an irresistible audience to marketers. Last year, Sharman raked in millions from US advertisers like Netflix and DirecTV, without spending a penny on content. The chase could have gone on forever.

And then, suddenly, a few days before Thanksgiving, it ended.

Hollywood's disdain for file-sharing can be measured in the 10-foot stack of papers that make up Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios v. Grokster et al., which sits on file in the Los Angeles federal courthouse. In the suit, a roster of entertainment conglomerates accuse FastTrack-enabled services Kazaa, Morpheus, and Grokster of profiting from a "21st-century piratical bazaar." Record labels and movie studios want the services closed and fined $150,000 for each illegally traded song or movie. Given the billions of files changing hands every week, the damages could be astronomical.

With US operations, Grokster and Morpheus were easy to pin down. But before attorneys could make their case against Kazaa, they had to find Sharman, which hadn't left so much as a paper trail to the US. Many of its contracts with US companies are negotiated through LEF, whose sole director is, not coincidentally, Nikki Hemming. So the lawyers asked their Australian counterparts to track her down. "They're doing everything they can to avoid being located," grumbles Richard Mallett, an executive with the Australasian Performing Right Association. One Australian attorney invoked the Hague Convention to obtain a court order compelling Hemming to turn over documents. Even then, the lawyer claims it took the subpoena server a week of cat-and-mouse games to corner her.

Finally, the company decided to stop running. Hemming chose to be deposed in Vancouver; she feared that simply stepping foot in the US could complicate matters. Likewise, she didn't show up at the late-November jurisdiction hearing in Los Angeles. Sharman's lawyers were there, however. The question before US District Court judge Stephen Wilson was simple: Does Sharman do enough business in the US to be lawfully included as part of the Morpheus-Grokster lawsuit? But the proceeding quickly became a referendum on the company's alleged sins. "Sharman has done everything it can to exploit and enhance the copyright-infringing activity of its members," said the industry's lead attorney David Kendall. "There is no intention to promote wrongful uses," countered Sharman lawyer Rod Dorman. "Is my client aware that people do that? Yes."

"I realize that some of these issues are uncharted," the judge told the attorneys. "I'm inclined to find there is jurisdiction against Sharman."

It was bad news for Sharman but, with the hearing on the industry's home turf, not surprising. Sharman has been preparing for litigation. For months, the company has been bundling Kazaa with Altnet, a P2P network that delivers encrypted songs, movies, and videogames. But while Kazaa downloads are free, Altnet works on a micropayment model - and has attracted legitimate technology and entertainment clients. As a result, Sharman is ready to argue that Kazaa can be put to legal uses and so, under the law, does not violate copyright statutes. With Altnet, Sharman has begun the transformation to an upstanding business.

Can a company built on the trafficking of other people's property shed the secrecy surrounding its operations and go legit? Hollywood's pinstriped suits think they know the answer to that question - it's a ruse. For every legal file on Altnet, there are millions of illegal ones on Kazaa. Altnet may be a good idea by itself, but on the back of Kazaa, it's one more tactic to delay prosecution while Sharman sells more advertising.

tell us what you think------------>

[k00alah]

yea i use kazaa lite too.. how do you use bittorent.. i d/led shareaaza and i go on suprnova.org.. but its soo confusing..

[mohjaco]

they say they can only catch you if you're sharing files, not downloading.

[tofumonzter]

well ya `coz they can`t sue you if you download it hehe

[twistedxmindz]

wayy too many pop-ups and almost messed up my comp -_-;;

[Maria]

yea and if you disable the option of sharing on kazaa [what i did] then you should be okay .. i think?

i have winmx but FOR ME it`s confusing, so i don`t use it

[SHORTIEGIRL05]

I used to download all the time, but stopped, then I started again, but now I rarely download. Only if I really like the song... I don't share files either.

[Yoyo]

I use Kazaa. Not too much, though. Just once in a while, and same with I-Mesh. I don't like Kazaa much, because it takes forever for the files to download, and they are always "Remotely Queued" or whatever. xD I-Mesh is much better and faster. And, I don't plan on stopping. The users getting sued are the ones downloading like 10,000 things. I probably have around 100 at the most, and that's music, anime, and movies combined.

[AsleepEyesOpen]

I use imesh, that seems to work

[juliar]

oh i use limewire now. it's nice, because i dont think anything comes bundled with it.

[HongKongDong]

OMG Juliar Boogiar!! Stop bringing back dead topics!!

[radhikaeatsraman]

Limewire pwns.

(I bring back the dead topics with Julia. UNNNNNNNNHHHHHHHH.)

[PrincessAda]

I use too.
But then it gave viruses so my brother uninstalled it and we got limewire.

[voguelove]

nooope. limewire.

[KissMe2408]

I've used Imesh before, I think it's pretty good.
However, I get most of my music from Limewire.
I find that to be most reliable.

[anniepiee]

Limewire babyyy

i think ares works well too.

[juliar]

Limewire babyyy

i think ares works well too.

i've heard of ares, is it better than limewire?

[Teesa]

Moved to Technology

[EddieV]

No I don't...

[sadolakced acid]

get peerguardian. it prevents governmetn computers from connecting to you.

[WickedDreamer]

I use Limewire if if I don't have any money on iTunes or you have to buy the whole CD in order to get one song. Kazaa screwed my computer up.

[anniepiee]

i've heard of ares, is it better than limewire?

yeah
it's similar to ares, but my friend used limewire after he couldnt find a song on ares.


limewire always has good connection.

[ecargnmyst]

nope

[*ranniel*]

ive never used Kazaa.

[aubbob]

i have limewire.
but i dont share the files...

[simx]

I use limewire....