Kazaa cuts out, coughs up

Author: Wil Harris
Published: 27th July 2006
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Kazaa cuts out, coughs up

Kazaa will pay over $115m and go legit.

Kazaa will stop facilitating the pirating of copyrighted material and will have to cough up more than $115m to account for past transgressions.

That's the terms of an agreement reached with the US content industry today. Lawsuits by the entz firms against Kazaa will be dropped and Kazaa will become a legitimate, Napster-esque service.

Kazaa will pay $115m to the RIAA, as well as an as-yet-unspecified amount to the MPAA.

CEO of the RIAA, Mitch Bainwol, said that "Services based on theft are going legit or going under, and a legal marketplace is showing real promise."

It seems that the bastions of the file-sharing world of old are now well and truly collapsed. Napster's gone, Grokster, and now Kazaa - we're left with new Napster, iTunes and BitTorrent.

Of course, Kazaa couldn't give a monkeys about the money - these are the same guys that developed Skype and then sold it to eBay for billions, so they're not short on cash.

Let us know what you think of the decision over in the forums.


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Kazaa cuts out, coughs up

The last bastion of the olde worlde of p2p is cutting loose, paying out hundreds of millions of dollars to the American entertainment industry.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2006/07/27/kazaa_cuts_out_coughs_up/1


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