India Broadband

Sharman Networks has said that they would be paying more than $100 million to settle music industry lawsuits over the illegal downloading of songs.

They are the operators of the popular p2p application Kazaa and have been facing lawsuits from companies like Vivendi SA’s Universal Music, Sony BMG, EMI Group Plc and Warner Music Group in Los Angeles and Australia.

They have also agreed to turn Kazaa into a legitimate service and would work on stopping their users to share and download digitally pirated games.

John Kennedy, chief executive officer of the London-based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry spoke on this new development: “For the industry we consider it a great success. It sends a huge deterrent message to other similar sites. We hope it will drive digital revenues in a major way.”