File Swapper Eluding Pursuers

[JackSpratts]

Unlike Napster, Kazaa's Global Nature Defies Legal Attacks
Ariana Eunjung Cha

TALLINN, Estonia -- Their office is spartan, with only five computers in various states of repair and nary a decoration on the wall. Few outside this Baltic capital would even recognize their names, though many of the world's largest recording and movie studios are well aware of their accomplishment.

Jaan Tallinn, Ahti Heinla and Priit Kasesalu are the creators of Kazaa.

Over the past two years, the oddly named product has become the most popular online file-swapping system in the world. Roughly 160 million people have downloaded the software, primarily to trade music, TV shows and movies over the Internet. At any given time, more than 3 million people are running the program, double the number that Napster had at its peak.

Kazaa has become so popular so fast that a coalition of entertainment companies has filed suit in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, seeking to shut it down. The coalition says the service has become a "candy store of infringement," where millions of pirated copies of songs, writings, TV shows and motion pictures are available to anyone, free.

Those same arguments helped the entertainment industry successfully close down Napster. But going after Kazaa is proving more difficult.

That's because Kazaa is a multinational creation. The three young men who developed the software hail from Estonia. They were commissioned to do the work by a company in the Netherlands. That company has since sold the software to another based in the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, whose executives work in Australia.

Filing suit against Kazaa, therefore, has forced the entertainment industry to negotiate the legal rules of no fewer than five countries on three continents.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2002Dec20.html

- js.