Kazaa to pay $100M!!!

[therunner]

LONDON (Reuters) - The music industry has reached a legal settlement with veteran antagonist Kazaa, one of the world's best known file-sharing networks and a longtime source of illicit music and movie downloads.

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Under the terms of the deal, Kazaa's owner Sharman Networks will pay the world's four major music companies -- Universal Music, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner Music -- more than $100 million and commit to immediately going legal, said the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

"There are very substantial damages being paid -- in excess of $100 million -- and Kazaa will go legal immediately. They've had time to prepare for this," said IFPI Chairman and Chief Executive John Kennedy.

The music industry has pursued an aggressive legal strategy in its attempts to curb Internet piracy, filing lawsuits against file-sharing companies like Kazaa and Grokster, as well as individual users who uploaded copyrighted material.

Meanwhile, legitimate music services like Apple's iTunes have become wildly popular, offering legal alternatives to illicit file-sharing.

Ovum analyst Jonathan Arber said the settlement would have a mostly symbolic importance, as Kazaa was past its prime.

"It's nowhere near as popular as it used to be. Very few people are thought to be using it anymore because better services came out," he said. "It is a big legal victory, a good symbol for them to put out, but in terms of actually reducing piracy, people migrated to other file-sharing networks a long time ago."

The IFPI said in a report on Thursday that last year there were $4.5 billion in pirated CD sales, or more than one in three CDs sold worldwide, and that there were 20 billion illegal downloads -- roughly three for every human being on Earth.

[ou812]

Damn the man............save the Empire