Shutdown of eDonkey file-sharing servers may be short-lived
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(InfoWorld) - The music industry claimed another legal victory in its battle against illegal file sharing in Europe on Friday, but the win may not last long. Seven servers that were part of theÂ eDonkey file-sharing networkÂ were shut down this week in Germany after a court granted injunctions, said the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), a recording industry trade group. The servers in Germany were responsible for maintaining an index of shared files on people's computers using the eDonkeyÂ p-to-p (peer-to-peer) network. Although the servers do not store the actual files, the servers are integral for searching on the network. That action, as well as other recent shutdowns of eDonkey servers in the Netherlands and France, has disabled use of the network to one million users, about a third of the total number of users, IFPI claimed. But research analyst Jonathan Arber of Ovum said more servers are likely to pop up to replace shuttered ones. Legal actions against eDonkey users now are "kind of like shutting the gate a few years after the horse has bolted," he said. The bigger threat to eDonkey may be losing users toÂ BitTorrent, which is currently the most popular P-to-P service, Arber said. BitTorrent has risen in use over the last year and now comprises between 50 percent to 75 percent of all P-to-P traffic on the Internet, according to Ipoque, a company that specializes in traffic analysis and managment. Use of eDonkey varies from 5 percent to 50 percent of Internet traffic and varies by region. A 2006 survey by Ipoque showed the most traded content on P-to-P networks is movies, music, computer games, e-books, audio books, and pornography. Figures released last month by Forrester Research showed two-thirds of European consumers who download content don't pay for it. Additionally, downloading music and movies has strained ISPs (Internet service providers), who are stuck with higher costs for carrying more traffic but get little new revenue opportunity from it. "Music files are still the most popular category to download, and the attraction of 'free' content has clearly left its mark on consumer behavior when it comes to downloading movies, the biggest bandwidth hogs of all," the report said. Â
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Kazaa&#39;s long-standing position as the most popular online file-sharing software appears to be over. Last month, the daily average of file-swappers on the FastTrack peer-to-peer network, which
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One of Denmark&#39;s largest ISPs said on Wednesday it will&#160;fight a court injunction mandating that it shut off access to a file-sharing Web site, in what could be a closely watched battle with the music industry in Europe.Tele2 met with representatives of other ISPs on Monday and decided to challenge the injunction, said Nicholai Pfeiffer, Tele2&#39;s chief of regulations.As a result, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is understood to have filed on Tuesday a further justification for the injunction with the court, Pfeiffer said.Tele2 has complied with the injunction and blocked its customers from accessing The Pirate Bay, a Web site that hosts torrents, or small information files used to download larger files from the BitTorrent P-to-P (peer-to-peer) network. The IFPI alleges that Danish Internet users are using BitTorrent to download, without authorization, copyright content that they found using The Pirate Bay&#39;s list of available torrents.No other Danish ISP has been ordered to shut off access to The Pirate Bay. However, IFPI plans to send letters this week to other Danish ISPs asking them to also block The Pirate Bay, said Jesper Bay, spokesman.&quot;Whether they are going to do that or not, it&#39;s up to them,&quot; Bay said, adding that IFPI hasn&#39;t decided whether to pursue more injunctions.Bay said the injunction has two purposes: It sends a signal to ISPs that they have a responsibility to stop piracy and to users that downloading copyright content without permission is illegal.The content the IFPI objects to is actually hosted on the PCs of users around the world. The torrents coordinate the download of file fragments from different PCs, and those fragments are eventually linked together to form a complete file that can then be uploaded to other machines. BitTorrent has many legitimate uses, including software distribution, and is used by some media companies to deliver their content.The record industry has employed companies specializing in file-sharing forensics to track down individual Internet users it says are sharing copyright content illegally. It also&#160;sought to shut down Web sites such as The Pirate Bay&#160;that are part of the P-to-P network.The Danish court concluded that Tele2 was assisting in copyright infringement. Tele2, as well as other ISPs that have come under pressure, maintain they are blind to what their customers transmit on their networks and should not be responsible for policing content.&quot;Our overall view is we don&#39;t actually want to take sides in this dispute between IFPI and The Pirate Bay,&quot; Pfeiffer said.The Pirate Bay said on Friday that traffic from Denmark has shot up 12 percent since Tele2&#39;s block was imposed. The Pirate Bay also set up an alternative Web site for Tele2 customers giving them instructions on how to circumvent the block.Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay faces trouble in its own waters. In Sweden, charges of profiting and encouraging copyright infringement are pending against four people involved with the Web site.&#160;
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And alternatives to Donkeys Letters eDonkey got its, er, ass kicked in the New York courts last week. And the RIAA owns its front page. And any visitor's IP addresses, it reckons. So, what to do, for the determined downloader?â¦
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Kazaa's long-standing position as the most popular online file-sharing software appears to be over. Last month, the daily average of file-swappers on the FastTrack peer-to-peer network, which includes Kazaa and related programs, was surpassed for the first time by users on the eDonkey/Overnet network, according to online tracking firm BayTSP Inc.
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One of Denmark's largest ISPs considers fighting a court order to shut off subscribers' access to the embattled file-sharing search engine.
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Seagate Technology's base in Limavady may be about to close with the loss of hundreds of jobs.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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Plus: File sharing growing like a Weed. [News.com Extra]
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What happens to open source in a cloud-based computing world?  Or when the enterprise runs dry?
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This is where computers go to die a green death.
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Some customers are concerned that domain registrar and hosting firm can't handle early move to Daylight Saving Time.
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With the price of disk storage plummeting, the storage capacity administrators find themselves managing is set to explode. But, the simple introduction of network block virtualization permits the use of underutilized storage management technologies such as mirroring, snapshots and replication on a much broader scale.
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TORONTO - One of the internet&#39;s most popular file-sharing websites has suddenly closed up shop, likely a high profile victim of the lawsuits launched last week against those operating servers using the BitTorrent network.
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The operators of Suprnova.org apologize to the service's users and quietly pull the plug. The shutdown follows hot on the heels of Hollywood's legal moves against BitTorrent tracker servers.
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Three weeks after sparking an internet user rebellion, the processing key used to encrypt HD DVD and Blu-ray discs is now obsolete -- and the replacement key has been cracked, too.
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(InfoWorld) - One of the last of the popular P-to-P (peer-to-peer) music sharing sites has been defeated, with eDonkeyâs agreement to settle its copyright infringement case with the record industry. In documents filed with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Monday, eDonkey founders and parent company MetaMachine Inc. said theyâll pay US$30 million to record companies to settle the case. They also agreed to refrain from conducting any further business that might involve copying, distributing or otherwise infringing copyrighted works. The settlement follows just more than a month after Sharman Networks Ltd., developer of the file-sharing software Kazaa, said it would pay the entertainment industry $100 million to settle similar lawsuits. Other file-sharing companies to succumb include Grokster Ltd., which shut down last year after losing a case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. The eDonkey Web site now features a statement, similar to one on the Grokster site, informing visitors that illegal downloaders can be prosecuted and ominously warning visitors that they arenât anonymous by displaying and claiming to log their IP address. The eDonkey settlement will be paid to Arista Records LLC, Atlantic Recording Corp., Capitol Records Inc., Elektra Entertainment Group Inc., Sony BMG Music Entertainment and UMG Recordings Inc. Lime Wire LLC is one of few the remaining popular file-sharing software companies although in August a group of record companies filed a suit against it in the U.S. asking for damages that could amount to as much as $476 million. Late last year, eDonkeyâs founder predicted the demise of the file-sharing industry. During a speech in front of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, he warned that U.S. P-to-P companies would all cease to exist because they would lack the resources to defend themselves against the record companies under the ruling he characterized as vague in the Grokster suit. The record companies and movie studios have spent the last couple years carrying out attacks against the creators of file-sharing software, contending they should be held liable for copyright infringement by their users. The file-sharing software developers have largely failed in their arguments that they warn users not to illegally transfer materials and so shouldn't be held responsible for how people use their products. REFERENCES: Kazaa settles with record industry, Jul. 27, 2006Grokster shuttered in court settlement, Nov. 7, 2005US P-to-P companies will disappear, executive says, Sep. 30, 2005