What Is Kazaa?
Kazaa is a p2p file-sharing program, that was first developed
in 2001 by Dutch developeres Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom.
It got its start as an open forum where users could share
and swap all kinds of files, including music, movies, games
and books, and users could share content that they’d created
and that they’d goten elsewhere. The second part is what got
Kazaa in to trouble. In 2001, Kazaa got sued,
which caused Zennstrom and Friis to shut it down and transfer
ownership of Kazaa to Sharman Networks, which
is based in the South Pacific. Despite all its legal troubles,
Kazaa remains in wide use today.
When you download Kazaa, you’ll be able
to search for music, movies, and TV episodes from Kazaa users
and other Internet sources, with up to three thousand results
per search. You will be able to download files from a variety
of sources at the same time, and if you have your own content,
you can promote it to other users. Searching for files is
easy- all you have to do is type its name into the appropriate
box, and hit the “Search" button. You’ll be provided
with a list of results, and when you find what you are looking
for, you can begin downloading.
There are two types of files on Kazaa: blue
and gold. Blue files are owned by other Kazaa users- they
can be licensed so that others can’t distribute it without
permission. However, they are free to download. Gold files
are typically content provided by music labels and movie studios,
and they’re distributed by Altnet on a pay-per-download basis.
Kazaa is free to use, and the company makes its profit through
advertising, selling Gold files, and its upgraded services.
Kazaa works on the well-known p2p platform, much as Napster
did. However, Kazaa is different because,
unlike Napster, its servers are decentralized. Users can share
content by connecting to each other directly, and the fact
that there are no central servers is a big part of what has
legally protected Kazaa for so long.
To pass data from one user to another, Kazaa runs on the
FastTrack protocol. It divides users into two groups: supernodes
and ordinary nodes. Supernodes are users with more powerful
and faster PCs, and high bandwidth. These act like a hub of
sorts, processing requests and serving up to 150 ordinary
nodes at one time. There’s a problem though- users have no
way to know whether or not they are a supernode. Despite this,
Kazaa remains quite popular among those who like to share
files.
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