KaZaA's parent company is urging peer-to-peer file swappers, its own and others, to lobby music companies and film studios to knock off the animosity toward KaZaA and other popular file-swap services.
"It's a call to action," said Sharman Networks chief executive officer Nikki Hemming to CNET, unwrapping a new print ad campaign aimed for major newspapers and Rolling Stone magazine this week. "We want to cut through the clutter, put our money where our mouth is and remind everybody of the opportunity being missed here."
CNET said this is the first major ad campaign from Sharman since they opened KaZaA for business two years ago, with the ads also aiming for college campus newspapers in the U.S., Great Britain, and Australia, as well as on Yahoo and other Websites. Sharman has been trying to convince the music and film industries to distribute their authorized versions of their works through KaZaA by way of new technology from Altnet, CNET said.
No major such company has agreed to such a partnership so far, while several are suing Sharman for copyright infringement. "Altnet and Sharman have experienced deafness on the part of the industry for way too long, and there's a point where you have to take action," Hemming told CNET.
One of the ads in the campaign is an open letter to media leaders saying the music and film companies are making a big mistake trying to close the P2P services. "Sixty million people have embraced this technology as a new and better way to get their entertainment," says the ad, as described by CNET. "They are not pirates. They are your customers."
CNET said the ad campaign may have partial funding through a deal between Sharman and eUniverse, which revealed last week they agreed to give Sharman $2.3 million in nonrefundable advances in a co-marketing deal.
