Kazaa sold to Australian company.

Popular peer-2-peer file trading app, Kazaa, has been sold along with several other undisclosed assets to Australian based Sharman Networks Limited. According to a statement on the Kazaa website;

Popular peer-2-peer file trading app, Kazaa, has been sold along with several other undisclosed assets to Australian based Sharman Networks Limited. According to a statement on the Kazaa website;

The original brains behind Kazaa have moved on to develop new innovative software.
The team now running Kazaa will continue to deliver the best technology for finding, saving and transferring all the data you want: no limits.

The only hint that Sharman Networks Ltd is based in Australia comes from Kazaa's new Terms of Service, part of which states;

11 Applicable Law

11.1 This License as well as all disputes arising out of or in connection with this Agreement shall be governed by the laws of the New South Wales, without regard to or application of choice of law rules or principles.

11.2 Any dispute arising out of or in connection with this License, or in future agreements resulting there from, shall be exclusively resolved before the competent court in New South Wales

However, not all is as it seems. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission hold no record of any company registered under the name Sharman Networks Limited and neither is the name registered as a business name in Australia. Sharman has no web presence we can find, and is listed with neither Yellow nor White Pages. We also put in a few database queries on potential patents held by Sharman Networks. Once again - no joy. Finally, a quick call to directory assistance (as the company may have been listed since the last yellow pages printing) also came up dry. As far as we can tell, no Australian Government (or indeed Industry) organisation has even heard of Sharman Networks, let alone had dealings with the company.

Until someone can demonstratably show us that Sharman Networks Limited does indeed exist, we remain sceptical. The only remaining option is that Sharman Networks Limited is a recently registered shell company trading under Sharman Networks, but listed with ASIC under a different name. This would possibly explain why there is no information on Sharman Networks in public record. However, it is highly unlikely that the ASIC would hold no information on this company's trade name.

Given the total lack of information available on Sharman Networks, the logical conclusion is that the company simply does not exist, making Kazaa's statement the next step in a bizarre attempt to circumvent recent rulings against it in a Dutch court.

--Brad Webb