Unlike Napster, Morpheus and Kazaa are much harder to stomp to death by litigation.
Kazaa attracted millions of users but soon faced legal challenges from the music industry.
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And the founders of Kazaa, another infamous peer-swapper, have launched a legal outlet called Joost.
Kazaa, which was recently sold to a private Australian company called Sharman Networks , boasts 17 million users.
Undeterred, Hollywood is waging a courtroom assault: The MPAA sued Morpheus' and Kazaa's owners in October to halt their file-swapping.
Stop Napster (nasdaq: NAPS - news - people ), and Grokster and Kazaa pop up to take its place.
Stop Napster, and Grokster and Kazaa pop up to take its place.
P2P programs, like Kazaa, create networks through which users can act as both clients and servers, sharing files through uploading and downloading.
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File-sharing systems, such as Kazaa, make it relatively easy to trace who is hosting which files by linking them to specific net addresses.
The deal will provide welcome cash for Sharman Networks, which owns Kazaa, and gives it a much needed stamp of approval from the business world.
As it released, the software Kazaa announced the tie-up with Tiscali.
Even so, the number of 99-cent tracks sold by these companies remains dwarfed by the free downloads still available using the likes of KaZaA and Grokster.
The RIAA said it had found more than 1, 700 music files on Ms Thomas-Rasset's Kazaa account, although this was reduced to 24 titles in the lawsuit.
Like many net companies Tiscali has been looking for a good reason to get people using broadband and Kazaa might help them convince customers to upgrade.
Many view BitTorrent as an evolution from older file sharing programs such as Napster and Kazaa in an attempt to stay one step ahead of the copyright laws.
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His rationale: since BT is spyware-free, relatively easy to use and decentralized, it avoids most of the problems that plagued the original Napster, Kazaa and other P2P services.
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Not so fast, see the Dutch supreme court ruled long ago in favor of the then Netherlands-based Kazaa and only classifies the upload of copyrighted material as illegal.
The case dates back to 2005, when the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) first accused Jammie Thomas-Rasset of illegally sharing songs on the now defunct service Kazaa.
Recently, peer-to-peer network Kazaa ran out of funds to contest legal action brought against it by the music industry, and in early June, Napster filed for bankruptcy protection.
When Bram Cohen first authored the BitTorrent spec in 2001, the intent was to improve file-sharing performance of existing single-source arenas -- Napster, KaZaA and their ilk.
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Under the deal the separate services will be cross-promoted and Kazaa will get a bounty for every user that signs up to Tiscali as a result of the advertising.
In 2001 Skype's founders had set up Kazaa, an online file-sharing service that enabled people to download music from each other's computers to the great irritation of copyright holders.
The only digital downloads available of Beatles recording are either very early recordings that Applecorps has no control over, or pirated files on services such as Kazaa or Morpheus.
Two popular file-swapping software programs already enable video piracy via PC: Morpheus and Kazaa, which are used mostly to transport songs and grainy reruns of Seinfeld, The Simpsons and South Park.
The case then went to court, where Ms Thomas-Rasset denied using Kazaa, but acknowledged that she had regularly used the "tereastarr" username associated with the offending Kazaa account elsewhere on the net.
Skype, which now has more than 663 million registered users world-wide, traces its roots to a file-sharing program, Kazaa, that grew popular for exchanging pirated music soon after its launch in 2001.
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Much of this early success was down to the founders' involvement with peer-to-peer file sharing site KaZaA, an at-times controversial but popular service which picked up the pieces when Napster crumbled under music industry pressure.
Similarly, P2Pnet.net, another online news site in British Columbia, is facing a lawsuit ironically filed by Sharman Networks, the company behind the Kazaa file-sharing system, that itself has been dragged through the courts in Australia.
Services with cool-sounding names like Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, Grokster, Morpheus, Gnutella, BitTorrent and MegaUpload flourished among the digital cognoscenti in the days when broadband Internet penetration had just started to gain real traction here and abroad.
The deal shows how far Skype has come since it was launched in 2003 by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, two men who had created a file-sharing technology called Kazaa that became widely associated with music piracy.
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