A 30 year old woman in the USA has been ordered in court to pay around $245,000 for illegal publishing of music via the Kazaa network. She has lodged an appeal.

Kazaa is a peer to peer network. If anyone had bothered to read the End User Licence Agreement (EULA) they would have run a mile. It said (in summary) that sharing copyright material is illegal and if the record industry ever came after Kazaa, they would happily hand over their users. Furthermore the users would be held liable for the legal bills.

And the worst bit was that the network was funded by advertising and the program contained heaps of spyware which you were not allowed to remove.

I’ve always said Kazaa was evil.

Frighteningly enough the same people wrote Skype. I have yet to pass judgement on that product.