Kazaa Pays Up in Piracy Case

Sharman Networks, the company behind the Kazaa file-sharing service, has agreed to pay $115 million to settle its long-running copyright dispute with the music and movie industries.

The pending settlement put to rest two copyright infringement cases led by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Universal Music Australia. The entertainment companies had charged Sharman and its peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing service Kazaa with facilitating the illegal trading of movies and song files.

File-sharing cases like the Grokster case, which involved another file-sharing company, StreamCast Networks, the operator of the Morpheus service, along with Grokster, went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2005 in a landmark defeat for the file-sharing companies

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