p2pnet.net News:- You have to feel sorry for the people at Sharman Networks, the company that owns Kazaa.

Try as they might, neither ceo Nikki Hemming nor her executive sales force can convince the Corporate Entertainment Sector that its members should be using Kazaa as a means of distribution, and that the dodgy ‘DRM’ technology being touted by its partner, Altnet, is the best way to stop anyone else from doing the same.

In February, Big Music’s Australian pseudo-cops raided the company’s offices and executives’ homes looking for evidence to back copyright infringement allegations.

To make things worse, the masses of people who used to be Kazaa’s loyal supporters are turning away, saddened by Sharman’s deeply cynical approach to business and its client base.

Now a Microsoft programmer who says he wrote Kazaa’s source code is suing over the rights to the software, and asking for $25 million in compensation.

“In the federal lawsuit, Fabian Toader, who now lives in Redmond, Wa., claims he wrote the computer code for the Kazaa program in 2000 while working in Romania on a freelance basis for Kazaa B.V., which sold the rights to the software in 2002 to Sharman Networks Ltd,” says an Associated Press story here, going on:

“Toader claims he never signed a contract with Kazaa B.V. and asserts that, under copyright laws in the United States and Romania, he is the copyright owner of the program, and not Sharman Networks. Toader, now a programmer for Microsoft, seeks a judgment confirming his rights to the program and $25 million in damages.

But Sharman says Toader’s work on early versions of Kazaa Media Desktop software, “was done under a work for hire agreement that expressly states that Kazaa B.V. owned all rights to any work related to the development of the software,” AP quotes Rich Chernela, a Sharman spokesman, as saying.

Last August, Sharman sued Toader in Washington State Superior Court, alleging he tried to blackmail the company. The court granted Sharman an injunction against him, Chernela said.

Toader countersued later that month in federal court in Seattle, then opted to dismiss the case without prejudice in February and refiled it in Los Angeles, attorney Marc Fenster says in the AP report.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 17th, 2004 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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