Kazaa Raided by Record Industry Investigators

Kazaa headquarters in Sydney Australia were raided by private investigators from the record industry in an attempt to uncover evidence of alleged copyright infringements. Kaaza is the world’s largest P2P file swapping network which specializes in giving its users the ability to trade music, picture and video files and claims to house 3 million to 4 million users at any given time.

Kazaa also is notorius in the Internet Marketing world for its distribution of adware over its free service (Kazaa offers an AdWare free version for $29.95). Kazaa also includes a search engine and adware system that shows results for non-URL queries in its users IE browser window.

According to AP reports, The Australian Federal Court gave five major Australian record labels permission to raid 12 premises in three states to collect evidence against Kazaa, said Michael Speck, general manager of the Music Industry Piracy Investigations. In the United States, a federal judge already has dismissed the entertainment industry’s lawsuits against two rival file-sharing services, Grokster Ltd. and StreamCast Networks Inc., saying they could not be held liable for what their users do with the software. Basically file swapping services let users swap any types of files (most being bootlegs or illegal). That ruling has been appealed, with a decision expected in February.

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