eDonkey Tells Congress It's Throwing in the Towel

An anonymous reader writes "Sam Yagen, President of eDonkey, testified at the Judiciary committee's hearing 'Protecting Copyright and Innovation in a Post-Grokster World'. It was there he told the committee that he is throwing in the towel. 'The Grokster standard requires divining a company's intent, the decision was essentially a call to litigate. This is critical because most startup companies just don't have very much money. Whereas I could have managed to pay for a summary judgment hearing under Betamax, I simply couldn't afford the protracted litigation needed to prove my case in court under Grokster. Without that financial ability, exiting the business was our only option despite my confidence that we never induced infringement and that we would have prevailed under the Grokster standard.'"

Comments

Who uses eDonkey anyway?

[DrXym]

I thought the open source and decentralized eMule was the tool of choice for the eDonkey network, with Shareaza and other tools following closely behind.

Re:Who uses eDonkey anyway?

[Jugalator]

Agreed, or to quote an eMule user having read that client's statistics:

Upload/Download to/from eDonkey has been less than 5% for years.

Re:that why I use eMule

[AceCaseOR]

IIRC, there are a lot of ed2k servers out there operated by third parties. Those will still be around.

Re:They just need to move to Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

The courts and copyright board have made no such declaration, rather that uploading copyrighted material is legal as the copyright law clearly specifies that a person may use another person's equipement to copy the audio recordings of that person which is exactly what a P2P application does.

Re:Welcome

[Arker]

There is no joke.

I'm assuming the 'joke' you perceive is the opposition of right-wing and capitalist.

While it's true that the right-wing sometimes purports to be capitalist, it's debateable whether that's ever been the case. The claim seems to be cyclical, but the right-wing is just as often anti-capitalist, when capitalism is inconvenient for the ancien regime it is considered left-wing. The whole right-left political language goes back to the early days of the French assembly, when the conservative aristocracy sat on the right, and the liberal mercantile class of capitalists on the left, in fact.

And the right wing party in America today is just as opposed to liberal capitalism as the left wing party, if not more so. Granted they like to claim the word, but watch their actions, not their words.

No, that was no joke.

Re:Welcome

[David Rolfe]

The movie and record industry (well their giant corporate overlords, Disney, G.E., News, Sony, Viacom and TimeWarner) are fond funders of the Republican party and their candidates. In a sense you could construe this to mean "Hollywood and records companies are [...] major contributors to the right-wing." Haha you were being sarcastic... but didn't know you were actually basically correct. Maybe it would be more precise if you'd implied "stage-hands, directors, and garage-bands" aren't major contributors to the right-wing. The content-monopoly companies sure as hell are.

To get you started:
http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/expend.asp?strID=C 00197749&Cycle=2004

You can look up the rest at the same site. Basically, all companies give money to support their vest interests. The expression-monopolizers want more copyright extensions, so they'll support anyone that will give it to them. U.S. car companies want the most profitable vehicles, so they'll make sure they support anyone that won't raise milage standards, etc.

So - while "they" don't feel indebted to Hollywood for Legally Blonde, they might feel indebted to them for their favorable contributions. http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/category.asp?txt=C 2400&cycle=2004