Kazaa Media Desktop (once capitalized as "KaZaA", but now usually left as "Kazaa") is a controversial peer-to-peer file sharing application using the FastTrack protocol.
Kazaa is commonly used to exchange MP3 music files over the Internet. It is also increasingly used to exchange movie files. The official Kazaa client can be downloaded free of charge and is financed by attached adware and Spyware (despite the "No Spyware" message displayed on Kazaa's website). Over the past years, Kazaa's parent was the target of many copyright-related lawsuits.
Kazaa and FastTrack were created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (also known as the inventors of Skype) and introduced by their Dutch company Consumer Empowerment in March 2001, near the end of the first generation of P2P networks. Napster shut down that July.
Initially, most users of Kazaa were users of the Morpheus program, formerly a client of MusicCity. But once the official Kazaa client became more widespread, its developers used their ability to automatically update it, changing the protocol in February 2002, to shut out Morpheus clients when its developers failed to pay license fees. Morpheus later became a client of the Gnutella network.
The company that distributed software called "Kazaa," which made it simple for millions of computer users to download music and movies over the Internet, has settled global $115M lawsuits brought by the entertainment industry, the industry said Thursday.
No comments:
Post a Comment