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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 owned by Australian company Sharman Networks and is famous for the alleged high number of computer viruses, trojans and worms.

Kazaa is commonly used to exchange MP3 music files over the Internet, however it can also be used to exchange other files types such as videos, applications, and documents. The official Kazaa client can be downloaded free of charge and is financed by bundled adware and spyware (despite the "No spyware" claims found on Kazaa's website). Throughout the past few years, Kazaa's developing company has been the target of many copyright-related lawsuits.

History

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 2000, near the end of the first generation of P2P networks. Napster had shut down music sharing in July 2002.

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.

Like the creators of similar products, Kazaa's owners have been taken to court by music publishing bodies to restrict its use in the sharing of copyrighted material. Consumer Empowerment was sued in the Netherlands in 2001 by the Dutch music publishing body, Buma/Stemra. In November 2001, the court ordered Kazaa's owners to take steps to prevent its users from violating copyrights, or else pay a heavy fine. Consumer Empowerment responded by selling the Kazaa application to a complicated mesh of offshore companies, primarily Sharman Networks, headquartered in Australia and incorporated in Vanuatu. In late March 2002, a Dutch court of appeal reversed an earlier judgment, and stated that Kazaa was not responsible for the actions of its users. Buma/Stemra lost its appeal before the Dutch Supreme Court in December 2003.

The legal problems for Kazaa were however only just beginning. Kazaa's new owner, Sharman, was sued in Los Angeles by the major record labels and motion pictures studios and a class of music publishers. The other defendants in that case—Grokster and MusicCity (makers of the Morpheus file-sharing software)—initially prevailed against the plaintiffs on summary judgment (Sharman joined the case too late to take advantage of that ruling). The summary judgment ruling was upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, but unanimously reversed by the US Supreme Court in a decision titled MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd..

Following that ruling in favor of the plaintiff labels and studios, Grokster almost immediately settled the case. Shortly thereafter, on 27 July 2006, it was announced that Sharman had also settled with the record industry and motion picture studios. As part of that settlement, the company agreed to pay $100 million in damages to the four major music companies—Universal Music, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner Music—and an undisclosed amount to the studios. Sharman also agreed to convert Kazaa into a legal music download service.

While the U.S. action was still pending, the record industry commenced proceedings against Sharman on its home turf. In February 2004, the Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA) announced its own legal action against Kazaa, alleging massive copyright breaches. The trial began on 29 November 2004. On 6 February 2005, the homes of two Sharman Networks executives and the offices of Sharman Networks in Australia were raided under a court order by ARIA to gather evidence for the trial.

On 5 September 2005, the Federal Court of Australia issued a landmark ruling that Sharman, though not itself guilty of copyright infringement, had "authorized" Kazaa users to illegally swap copyrighted songs. The court ruled six defendants—including Kazaa's owners Sharman Networks, Sharman's Sydney-based boss Nikki Hemming and associate Kevin Bermeister—had knowingly allowed Kazaa users to illegally swap copyrighted songs. The company was ordered to modify the software within two months (a ruling enforceable only in Australia). Sharman and the other five parties faced paying millions of dollars in damages to the record labels that instigated the legal action.

On 5 December 2005, the Federal Court of Australia ceased downloads of Kazaa in Australia after Sharman Networks failed to modify their software by the December 5th deadline. Users with an Australian or New Zealand (because of IP address similarity) IP address were greeted with the message "Important Notice: The download of the Kazaa Media Desktop by users in Australia is not permitted" when visiting Kazaa website. Sharman planned to appeal the Australian decision, but ultimately settled the case as part of its global settlement with the record labels and studios in the United States.

In yet another set of related cases, in September 2003, the RIAA (trade association of the music industry) filed suit in civil court against several private individuals who had shared large numbers of files with Kazaa; most of these suits were settled with monetary payments averaging $3,000. Sharman Networks responded with a lawsuit against the RIAA, alleging that the terms of use of the network were violated and that unauthorized client software (such as Kazaa Lite, see below) was used in the investigation to track down the individual file sharers. An effort to throw out this suit was denied in January 2004. However, that suit was also settled in 2006 (see above)

Nikki Hemming sues p2pnet

In an unrelated case, Sharman Networks and Nikki Hemming, the Kazaa CEO, is suing Canadian digital media news site p2pnet , claiming it defamed Hemming in an article quoting an Associated Press story and a reader's comment.

The case was widely reported in the mainstream media, including an article in the BBC written by Canadian internet law expert Dr Michael Geist.

"The suit, launched by Sharman Networks' Nikki Hemming, has attracted considerable international attention because of the parties involved - Sharman Networks is the Australian-based owner of Kazaa, the peer-to-peer file sharing service that last week agreed to pay the entertainment industry $100m (£53m) to settle ongoing litigation," says Geist in the article.

"It also highlights the vulnerability of thousands of individuals to defamation lawsuits merely for providing access to other people's comments.

"Even individual bloggers who permit comments face the prospect of demands to remove content that is alleged to violate the law

"Both Sharman Networks and Hemming sued P2Pnet last spring, claiming that an article and accompanying comments posted by readers of the site were libelous.

"Jon Newton, the owner of the site, has vigorously disputed the suit, pointing to the need to protect free speech and to ensure that defamation laws cannot be used to stifle comment.

"Sharman Networks recently dropped its claim, however the Hemming suit continues."

Newton has elected to go to trial and the case is expected to be heard in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, either late this year, or sometime in 2008. p2pnet is based on Vancouver Island off the BC mainland.

Bundled malware

Kazaa has, from early on, installed malware onto users' computers. Sharman, Kazaa's home company, claims that the products are not adware and do not collect personal user information. At one time, the part of the Kazaa code which was considered adware was an optional part of the Kazaa program, albeit one technically difficult to omit during installation. Since the allegations have surfaced, however, the code has been bundled into the main Kazaa software, and it is not possible to uninstall it. Also, spyware detection and removal software has frequently failed to delete the code without special actions taken by the PC user. Spyware components detected and deleted by removal programs will often render Kazaa unusable and require reinstallation of the program. This forces the user to allow these programs on their computer to keep Kazaa working. The malware is unclosable and must be closed in the Windows Task Manager.

Malware installed by Kazaa includes the following:

• Cydoor (spyware): Collects information on the PC's surfing habits and passes it on to the company which created Cydoor.
• B3D (adware): An add-on which causes advertising popups if the PC accesses a website which triggers the B3D code.
• Altnet (adware): A distribution network for paid "gold" files.
• GAIN (spyware): Identifies your interests based on some of your computer usage and some of your web surfing behavior, including the URLs of Web pages viewed by you and other criteria. Versions of Kazaa released after 16 August 2005 do not have this.
• The Best Offers (adware): Tracks your browsing habits and internet usage to display advertisements similar to your interests.
• InstaFinder (hijacker): Redirects your URL typing errors to InstaFinder's web page instead of the standard search page.
• TopSearch (adware): Displays paid songs and media related to your search in Kazaa.
• RX Toolbar (spyware): The toolbar monitors all the sites you visit with Microsoft Internet Explorer and provides links to competitors' websites.
• New.Net (hijacker): A browser plugin that lets you access several of its own unofficial Top Level Domain names, e.g., .chat and .shop. The main purpose of which is to sell domain names such as www.record.shop which is actually www.record.shop.new.net.

As a result of these additional components, CNET's Download.com site stopped the distribution of KaZaA in April 2004.

Kazaa is also known to not completely uninstall. It leaves behind several executables, files, and the Kazaa installer. It also leaves behind all the malware it installed. In an effort to remove the files left behind, Merijn Bellekom (the creator of HijackThis), available here: has created KazaaBeGone. This program executes script to remove any remnants left behind by Kazaa's uninstaller program.

Current state

Kazaa still offers a download on its official website for Kazaa 3.25. However, copyrighted music or movies can no longer be downloaded or shared. Copyrighted music cannot be purchased from the website (like Napster, etc). The Kazaa site no longer seems to be updated, showing the total downloads and last week's downloads (which does not change from week to week). The contact links on the website also do not work (not even for advertisers) which may indicate Kazaa is no longer promoting their product.

Peer to peer clients can still share their personal or non-copyrighted files. The traffic on Kazaa has dropped from millions to hundreds or less at a given time. Some users still use the old network, on Kazaa Lite or Kazaa Resurrection which is still a self-sustaining network where thousands of users still share unrestricted content. However, in the wake of the bad publicity and lawsuits, even the numbers of users on Kazaa Lite has dropped dramatically. They have gone from several millions users at a given time to mere thousands. Before, all users combined on the same fastrack network, with some using the ad-supported Kazaa, others using Kazaa Lite and other non-authorized versions all plugged in at the same time and sharing countless songs, movies, etc. The size of the lawsuit Kazaa settled is said to only have been a drop in the bucket to the amount of media that was shared and copied to tens of millions of users on Kazaa worldwide for years. Without further recourse and until the lawsuit was settled, the RIAA actively sued thousands of people across the USA for sharing copyrighted music across the network. College campus networks were also a focus of the RIAA's many lawsuits. Many of these cases are still in the process of being settled or are headed for trial. Although the lawsuits were mainly in the United States, other countries also began to follow suit.

Variations

This section is limited to those programs which are based on the official Kazaa client. For other FastTrack-compatible clients, see FastTrack.

Kazaa Lite is an unauthorized modification of the Kazaa Media Desktop application which excludes adware and spyware and provides slightly extended functionality. It became available in April 2002. It can be downloaded free of charge, and as of mid-2005 was almost as widely used as the official Kazaa client itself. It connects to the same FastTrack network and thus allows to exchange files with all Kazaa users. It was created by third party programmers by modifying the binary of the original Kazaa application. Later versions of Kazaa Lite included K++, a memory patcher that removed search limit restrictions, multisource limits, and set one's "participation level" to the maximum of 1000. Sharman Networks considers Kazaa Lite to be a copyright violation.

After development of Kazaa Lite stopped, K-Lite v2.6, Kazaa Lite Resurrection and Kazaa Lite Tools appeared. Although K-Lite is related to Kazaa Lite and the name sounds similar, they are actually different projects. K-Lite is not an update to Kazaa Lite, and was instead written as a separate loader with many fundamental changes. Unlike Kazaa Lite, which is a modification of an old version of Kazaa, K-Lite v2.6 requires the original KMD 2.6 executable to run. K-Lite doesn't include any code by Sharman: it requires the user to supply the original, unpatched Kazaa Media Desktop, and they execute it in an environment which removes the malware and adds some features. The authors believe that this version might therefore be legal. They also hope that since this client uses a newer version of the actual Kazaa program, they won't be affected by attempts to block Kazaa Lite from the network.

In November 2004, the developers of K-Lite released K-Lite v2.7, which similarly requires the KMD 2.7 executable. Currently, other clean variants use an older core (2.02) and thus, K-Lite has some features that others will never have. K-Lite includes multiple search tabs, a custom toolbar, and autostart. It also has auto search more, a download accelerator, an optional splash screen, preview with option (to view files you are currently downloading), an IP blocker, Magnet links support, and ad blocking, although the clients based on the 2.02 core abstract these functions to third-party programs.

Kazaa Lite Tools on the other hand is in fact an update of the original Kazaa Lite. It's a copy of Kazaa Lite, with modifications to the third-party programs included. It has newer and more tools included.

Kazaa Lite Resurrection which had appeared right after Kazaa Lite development was stopped in August 2003 is an update of the original Kazaa Lite.

Criticisms

According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), "Child pornography is easily found and downloaded from peer-to-peer networks," and that " In one search, using 12 keywords known to be associated with child pornography on the Internet, GAO identified 1,286 titles and file names, determining that 543 (about 42 percent) were associated with child pornography images. Of the remaining, 34 percent were classified as adult pornography and 24 percent as nonpornographic."

Trivia

• Kazaa is mentioned in the "Weird Al" Yankovic song "Don't Download This Song"
• The word means Let's go (가자) in Korean.
• The word also means Goat (Коза) in Russian.

References

1. P2PNet
2. "Supreme Court Rules Against P2P Companies!" Slyck News
3. Kazaa site becomes legal service
4. Federal Court of Australia
5. CNet News
6. GAO's Report on the availability of child pornography on file sharing programs (PDF)

External links

• Kazaa's official website
• Judge to Decide on Kazaa Suit - 2002 MP3 Newswire essay on the international conflicts of the US Kazaa trial.
• Boardwatch Interview with Niklas Zennstrom (July 17 2003)
• August 11, 2003 and March 17, 2005 letters from Sharman to Google
• Allegations of Kazaa tampering with Windows system files
• Kazaa pays $10 million to settle lawsuit
• Discussion of Kazaa installation of spyware
• Lists of scam sites to avoid:
• Slyck's Kazaa Guide
• Kazaa Lite FAQ - The original Kazaa Lite FAQ together with a few updates (CHM format)
• KaZaA Supernode Patch Supernode Patch
• Kool Lite Tools - Home of Kazaa Lite Tools K++
• My K-Lite - Home of K-Lite v2.6/2.7
• Merijn.org, home of KazaaBeGone
• CA rates Kazaa as "worst spyware offender"
• salon article on Kazaa (and industry) bundling of spyware
• Ziff-Davis article on specific spyware bundled with Kazaa
• spyware in 2006

• File sharing programs
• Virtual communities