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The notorious Kazaa peer-to-peer file sharing service is back from the dead three years after it was shut down by the music industry in a $150 million lawsuit.But the software looks entirely different this time around, with users forced to pay for their music instead of trading tracks illegally.Kevin Bermeister, who was behind much of the technology in the original Kazaa, is leading the relaunch of the new service through his company, Brilliant Digital Entertainment. Bermeister is based in Rose Bay in Sydney but the company has offices in Los Angeles and New York.One of his unlikely offsiders is Michael Speck, who ran the music industry's case against Kazaa as the head of its anti-piracy arm, Music Industry Piracy Investigations."Only one in 20 of all [music] downloads gets paid for and no legitimate operator has been able to change that, until now," said Speck.The new Kazaa, to be announced on Tuesday, will initially only be available to people in the United States due to licensing issues but Bermeister said he was expecting it to be available to Australians within six months.In the US, customers pay $US20 a month and can download as many songs as they like."People have been enamoured with the ability to rebel and break through and get stuff for free, but I think sentiment is changing and people are going to shift towards a quality [legal] product," Bermeister said in a phone interview.He acknowledged that there was a plethora of competition in the digital music retail space but said the Kazaa brand was a major selling point as consumers were "intrigued to go back to a brand that they spent a lot of time on and lived with for so many years".He said one of the key features of the new Kazaa was the ability of people to pay for the service through their monthly phone bill. People will also be able to upload and share their home videos.Bermeister appears to have the support of the music industry, with all four major record labels and a number of independent labels signing up to provide the service with a one-million track catalogue."If Kazaa stands up as a legitimate digital music service, which ensures that creators and content owners are appropriately remunerated for their rights, then of course we would support it," said Marianna Annas, general manager of MIPI.Like many other digital music stores hoping to compete with Apple's iTunes, Kazaa might struggle to gain any meaningful share of the market because tracks are encoded using Microsoft's WMA format.This format is not supported by iPods but can be converted into the more common MP3 format with specialist software. It is understood that using the WMA format - which limits to five the number of different devices a track can be transferred to - was a necessity in order to obtain permission from the music studios.
