Member Avatar for Zephyroza

File Sharing site Kazza is now to become a legal downloading service after a lot of legal battles. The company will also be paying $100mill to the record industry. Over the past year 20 million music songs have been downloaded illegally and many company's are losing a lot of money selling music disks because people just download them for free. Napster another music sharing company has become legal to. Mark Mulligan, an analyst with Jupiter Research said the amount of damages that Kazaa are willing to pay demonstrates how big the service had become. "$100m is half of the legitimate music downloads market in Europe," he said. The Kazza software has been download around 239 million times.

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A concise, source-backed summary and practical context for the thread (responding to , and ).

Major news outlets reported that Sharman (the company behind Kazaa) reached an out‑of‑court settlement with record labels and studios in late July 2006 and agreed to stop facilitating mass copyright infringement while moving toward licensed distribution and technical countermeasures. The Guardian and Wired provide contemporaneous coverage.

“Going legal” in this context did not instantly make all past file sharing lawful — it meant changing business practices: negotiate licenses, alter the client/protocol, and add mechanisms intended to discourage or block copyrighted material. Reporting of the time describes the company’s pledge to build anti‑piracy controls into the software. Wired and follow‑ups in mainstream press document those commitments.

Technical options the courts and commentators talked about included forced client updates, keyword blocking, flooding search results with warnings, or using content‑fingerprinting/hash blacklists to block known copyrighted files. The Australian court record and summaries explain the kinds of changes the judges said were possible; these measures can create false positives, raise privacy and reliability concerns, and are often a cat‑and‑mouse game. (See Stanford’s collection of court material and analysis.) Stanford/WILMAP summary.

A separate but related concern was user safety: watchdogs in 2006 flagged the official Kazaa client for bundled adware/spyware components, so caution about leftover P2P installs and bundled software is warranted. eWeek / StopBadware coverage.

On the economics raised by : academic work on file‑sharing’s net effect on sales is mixed — some studies find limited aggregate impact while others disagree — so simple assertions that “no one lost money” are too broad; see the debate around the Oberholzer‑Gee & Strumpf analysis for one influential view. Ars Technica summary / JPE references .

Practical takeaway: treat “going legal” as a business pivot, not an amnesty for past sharing; verify any client updates through reputable sources and remove legacy P2P software if adware/spyware is a concern.

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Member Avatar for louddwarf

where's this information come from? Don't mind if I check the source for myself. ;)

Member Avatar for Toulinwoek

I think that what Kazaa stood for was against some law somewhere, and of course that aspect of it needs to be addressed, but as one who has actually touched into the music business, I can assure you that no one, absolutely NO ONE, lost any money. Companies and artists might not have earned as much as they would have otherwise, but lost money? Not a cent.
Even people on the very low end of the totem pole make incredible amounts of money in the music business.
So, from the standpoint of Law, I have to agree with things like this, but I don't feel an ounce of sorrow for some artist who earns $3 million a year in royalties and points instead of $4 million. Again, the Law gives them the right to that $4 million and they should have it, but only because of the law, not them simpering over their greed.

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