Kazaa

For those of you that remember the Kazaa program as being an unrestricted peer-to-peer application
and your number one source for downloading music, movies and games, those days are over as far as
Kazaa is concerned. Kazaa is only available now as a media desktop application and operates as a music
subscription service where you pay a monthly fee and receive unlimited downloads.

Kazaa was originally developed as a P2P client using the FastTrack protocol and was released in 2001
by Dutch company Consumer Empowerment. It subsequently faced a lawsuit in the Netherlands by
the Dutch music publishing body and later was sued by the music and motion picture industry in the
USA. The pressure was too much for Consumer Empowerment and so they sold Kazaa to Australian
company Sharman Networks; legal proceedings concluded that Kazaa was not responsible for its user