HOWZAT

Sharman’s “peer-to-peer” (P2P) software, whose full name is Kazaa Media Desktop, was last year the most downloaded software in internet history — with 3.5m users at any given moment. Sharman makes its money from a slice of digital content sold to Kazaa users — although, as a private firm, no profit figures are available.

Hemming is determined to protect her product. She recently denounced the record labels’ legal attack as the last, desperate resort of an industry that had singularly failed to grasp the technology of the future. “While today our technology is being damned by the music industry,” she said, “and their fans are being sued, by the very people who are losing touch with that fan base — in future this technology is something they will wholeheartedly embrace. They will look back and say what a waste of time and money the litigation was.”

In provoking Hemming, the record labels have roused a tigress — although the blonde, privately educated Englishwoman from Northamptonshire may not look it. “My mother used to whisper in my ear when I went to bed at night, ‘you can do anything’. I embraced what my mum had to say to me.”

After travelling the world and working at several software publishers she was headhunted to run international sales at Virgin Interactive. Here she got to know Sir Richard Branson: “I consider him to be not only a guru but one of the inspirations in my life,” she said.

“Richard has an incredible sense of self. He is a determined visionary and is able to see beyond the horizon. He is prepared to face a tremendous amount of push-back from the established players in markets that he enters, and not be deterred by that.”

She has also drawn deeply on her own skills. “To remain constant in the face of uncertainty is a skill that is God-given,” she said. “You can’t learn that. To focus and keep several balls in the air when the very ground you are standing on is moving, is a unique skill. I believe it’s something that I’ve honed.”

She helped to build Virgin Interactive into one of the larger software publishers in Europe. Then she turned her mind to building her own business dream, and established Sharman Networks in 2002.

Kazaa has made Hemming rich, but money seems to play second fiddle to her main preoccupation: a mission to break the record industry’s control of music distribution; deliver Kazaa’s “magic” to the world; and prove her democratic message — that peer-to-peer software is the future. That mission now looks doomed.

Undismayed, she counters the music industry’s challenge with the argument by saying that just as BMW is not responsible for policing the speed at which people drive, so Sharman cannot be held accountable for the way users of Kazaa swap digital files.

In 2004, her firm even tried to help the record labels get a grip on the new technology by cheekily offering to encrypt the artists’ music, and sell it to Kazaa users, on the producers’ behalf. Hemming’s offer was met with a deafening silence.

In any case, such co-operative ideas have now been trampled under the legal juggernaut that crashed into her company last week.

Justice Murray Wilcox of Australia’s federal court concluded dourly that most of Kazaa’s music files were “shared without the approval of the relevant copyright owner”.

At EMI Australia John O’Donnell, managing director, said Kazaa had profited from the piracy “in a big way”.

Hemming’s last hope of saving her company rests on an appeal against the combined might of the record labels. She is ready for the challenge.

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