Kazaa Blocks Australian Users

afaik_ianal writes "The Sydney Morning herald is reporting that Kazaa is blocking Australian downloads of their client, just a day after the deadline passed for implementing keyword filters. According to the article, Shaman networks were still working on installing the filters yesterday."

Comments

It's kind of funny...

[Corsican Upstart]

It's kind of funny.. they're based in Australia, and they can serve everyone but citizens of their own country...

Re:It's kind of funny...

[kocsonya]

> It's kind of funny.. they're based in Australia, and they can serve
> everyone but citizens of their own country...

What's new? The government in Canberra has been doing it for ages...

Re:It's kind of funny...

[NoGuffCheck]

While Sharman Networks is based in Australia here is the company structure:

Sharman Networks was registered in Vanuatu in January 2002 as a private company that markets and owns Kazaa.
Kazaa includes Kazaa Media Desktop, kazaa.com and kazza.n et.
Sharman Networks has nil authorised capital and two ordinary issued shares.
The shareholders are two companies: Global Nominees and Credit Facilities Limited.
The beneficial owne rs are Vanuatu International Trust Company Ltd as a trustee for the Sharman Trust.
Sharman License Holdings is 100 per cent owned by Sharman Networks, and the beneficial owner is Sharman Trust.
Worldwide Nominees is the director of Sharman Networks and Sharman License Holdings.
Worldwide Nominees is owned by Global Nominees and Credit Facilities Limited. The director is Geoffrey Gee and Regent Limited. Geoffrey Gee is a Vanuatu-based solicitor.
The beneficial owner is Trustees International Limited as trustee for Golden Sands Trust.
Global Nominees is a Vanuatuan company, the beneficial owners of which are the partners of Vanuatu accounting firm, BDO.
Credit Facilities Limited, which is one of the nominal shareholders of the shares in Sharman Networks, is similarly a BDO company.
Lindsay Barrett is a partner of BDO in Vanuatu. He's also director of Vanuatu International Trust Company, VITCO.
VITCO is the trustee of the Sharman Trust and owner of the whole of the issued capital of Sharman Networks Limited.
The nominated eligible beneficiaries as defined in the trust deed are the International Red Cross.
The International Red Cross claims to have never been contacted about this. Nikki Hemming is listed as "director" of VITCO, which is the beneficial shareholder of the Sharman companies located in Vanuatu.
Sharman operates in Australia via LEF Interactive.
LEF is an Australian registered private proprietary limited company. Sole director is Nicola Anne Hemming, whose only property asset has been sold to Sharman accountant John Simon Myer.
LEF has paid up capital of $1.00.
If you can set up this sort of company structure and understand it, you deserve to live in a multi million dollar mansion.


Now I cant remember what your question was but I hope my answer clears it up for you...

So.

[Data Link Layer]

Looks like those 14 people are going to have to find another method to all their copyright infringed material from.

Re:That's okay

[mattjb0010]

Just like America has nothing but Britney spears and Gigli. Serious, how does such an ignorant troll get modded "insightful"?

Re:That's okay

[Anonymous Coward]

You Australians are pretty uppity for being down under.

Irrelevant

[bwd]

Kazaa has been relegated to the trash-heap of the net with the advent of bittorrent and registration-only bittorrent trackers. They went the same direction of Napster, because they were litigated into nonexistence.

Decentralization is key to survival now if you want to avoid litigation on the infrastructure.

Nobody will care

[Mancat]

Kazaa was good in its day, but offers little to no anonymity, and is completely infiltrated by RIAA/MPAA/*. So, if you want to go to jail, go ahead and use Kazaa to download your copyrighted material.

That being said, few people are still using it. Nobody will care. Those that do care, can now move on to a better client/network.

Re:Irrelevant -- reasons for trash heap

[Nom du Keyboard]

Kazaa has been relegated to the trash-heap of the net with the advent of bittorrent and registration-only bittorrent trackers.

Kazaa has been relegated to the trash-heap of the net because it's laden with spyware, has an ineffective hashing system that has allowed it to become more polluted by OverPeer and its ilk than any other P2P system (in excess of 50% of the files on KaZaA are damaged, in excess of 90% for some very new releases), hasn't been updated in 3 years, and gathers more lawsuits of users than all other P2P systems combined.