File-sharing site Kazaa will become a legal music download service following a series of high profile legal battles. The peer-to-peer network has also agreed to pay $100m (?53m) in damages to the record industry.
The announcement follows the release of a music industry report that says more than 20 billion music tracks have been downloaded illegally in the last year. File sharing and music piracy are key factors in the recent decline in record sales, according to the music business.
“We have won another battle in an ongoing war,” said John Kennedy, chairman and CEO of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industries (IFPI). “We move forward with a spring in our step.” Kazaa follows other sites like Napster which now offers legal downloads.
Mark Mulligan, an analyst with Jupiter Research said the amount of damages that Kazaa are willing to pay demonstrates how big the service had become.
“$100m is half of the legitimate music downloads market in Europe,” he said. At its peak the site had more than four million simultaneous users. The Kazaa software has been downloaded 239 million times.
News source: BBC News
the music industry is getting bigger because more and more people likes to hear new music artists and new genres ‘
i prefer to download musi from the ipod website or amazon, sometimes i download on emile too “”
my favorite music download site is always peer to peer networks like emule and torrents ~:,
the music industry would always be a thriving industry specially these days where we listen to a lot of music `;`
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