Legal/Government

Vanuatu? Vanuatu!!

Wired has a great article about how Kazaa moved down under. The entire story is great read, but the most interesting part was the exposure of how the company operates in Sydney.

It turns out that Sharman Networks is a Vanuatu company, and Vanuatu is a known tax and intellectual property shelter. Sharman does not have offices in Vanuatu -- instead the Australian company LEF contracts for all of the work done by Sharman. This means that LEF is simply a contractor who does not operate any file sharing network -- they do work for Vanuatu based Sharman, and Sharman officially operates the file sharing network. This is a great scam, since LEF is not doing anything illegal in Australia, and Sharman networks is not doing anything illegal in Vanuatu.

Interesting legal wrangling -- and it worked for over a year, but now the cartel is close on its heels.

Posted by Mayhem at January 27, 2003 10:42 AM