Kazaa Info/History Portal

~ KaZaA Summary ~

It is interesting the direction computer technology has taken. Brands like Kazaa (just to let you know, the "actual" branded Kazaa is at Kazaa.com) are really pushing the limits of what is possible with computer to computer access. First individual computers, then file uploading technologies, then Kazaa. Here is what About.com has to say about its history:

"KaZaA is a second-generation peer-to-peer file-sharing service with which you can search and download media files from other Kazaa users. Kazaa is currently owned by an Australian company called Sharman Networks that has battled the same copyright and legal issues surrounding other peer-to-peer networking programs like Napster. Niklas Zennstrom and Janis Friis, are Dutch software programmers who invented KaZaA. About 360 million PCs and increasing have KaZaA installed."

The Kazaa "Revolution" as the founders have rightly called their movement, is without the harsher backlash that Shawn Fanning and his Napster faced as an upstart and viral P2P network. Bought out by BMG, from most of the testimonials that you'll find, his uncle was actually one of the main beneficiaries, whereas he was left with essentially nothing. Napster was a business that wasn't a business.

Kazaa is a business that saw the success of Napster, Ngutella and others and capitalized on already well-established business acumen to create a viable business model based largely on the back-end efforts of Fanning and others. Kazaa.com claims that now about 1.4million people download Kazaa weekly (the free version). Word to the wise though--you might go for the higher, paid model just because it does not have such annoying ads! Cheers--just don't get caught by the Record Industry!!!

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