Is Kazaa Past Its Prime?
The owners of the popular Kazaa file-swapping software have withstood assaults from the record industry for years, but now they're facing a new enemy that may be even harder to fight: competition.
Source: ZDNetWhen a federal judge shut down Napster in 2001, Kazaa parent Sharman Networks quickly stepped in as the replacement of choice, signing up millions of users and even surpassing its predecessor in some respects. Since then, however, newcomers such as eDonkey and BitTorrent have been coming on strong amid reports that millions of people are logging off Sharman's network. Although it's too early to draw broad conclusions about Sharman's future, experts said many people appear to be shopping more intently than ever for file-swapping alternatives that incorporate improvements in peer-to-peer technology that have not yet made it onto Kazaa. "At heart, most of these peer-to-peer users are lazy," said Chris Hedgecock, president of Zeropaid, a popular portal site dedicated to file-swapping services. "Kazaa was simply the easiest way to get things they were looking for. Now they're being frustrated. It's taking longer to get files, so they're looking elsewhere."
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i always had trouble finding obscure songs on kazaa. i've had much more luck with bittorrent than i ever did with kazaa (mostly because on kazaa a lot of the time you got stuff with copy protection thrown in, and it was hard to find entire cd's at a good quality, etc)
all 1950's jazz no longer covered by copyright laws... of course