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

Re:that why I use eMule

[InvalidError]

eDonkey is only a client application, there are plenty of independent eD2k servers out there that will continue to operate without it.

eMule also has it own kademlia network for distributed content indexing but it requires a server to fetch some clients to bootstrap off of - very much like Gnutella. If you do not mind hunting down a bootstrap IP:Port yourself and entering it manually, then you can use Kad without eD2k servers.

They just need to move to Canada

[Pig Hogger]

They just need to move to Canada, where the Supreme Court decided that file sharing is legal. Voilà! Problem solved!

Re:They just need to move to Canada

[Dixie_Flatline]

NO. Downloading music and movies is legal because it is legal. The tariff is there as something extra, but it has never impacted the legality of downloading musing and movies. The tariff is a transparent money-grab by the recording industry, and the government has recently recognized it as such, which is why if you bought an iPod in 2003-2004, you can apply to get the levy back.

Leave the levy out of this. Levies never give you the right to do anything - it would not be legal to shoot people if there were a levy on bullets trying to compensate victims' families. The levy is there because the industry is greedy and antiquated.

ANYTHING can be used to commit a crime

[ausoleil]

By your example, Xerox would have never made it out of the garage.

A pen can be used for copyright vioations, as can a camera. How much ink is invested in illegal copying every year is anyone's guess. Cameras, the same thing.

Yes, I know that those are ridiculous examples. However, under the Grokster standard, either of the latter could be considered instruments for wanton copyright violation (despite the ridiculousness of it) and be banned...if they were new technologies.

Most any tool, be it software or hardware, is capable of being used illegally. That people do so is not so much a reflection of most tools but instead a reflection on those people.

I wonder if

[zappepcs]

this is just a case of proving that the *AA really are bullying? If you can't afford to fight them (or just claim it) isn't that bad press for the *AA? Isn't this proof that they are attempting to rule what innovations should be allowed and which shouldn't? Doesn't this demonstrate that you can have a business or technology as long as it doesn't harm anyone else? at least not those with 150 year copyrights (even if your business isnt't designed to ruin them). Wow, those poor folk that owned train businesses! And those bad people that built horse drawn wagons. They got put out of business... shouldn't we pay their families restitution? .... Seems to me that this is the pinnacle of why software patents, DRMing, and such are stiffling innovation, and using monopolistic business practices.

Re:And why not?

[Red Flayer]

I thought about it. The original Cochran quote was, "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit." The quote has been changed, even in Conchran's memoirs, to "If the glove doesn't..."

I shortened "doesn't" to "don't" because "don't" is better for comedic flow, and because I wanted to drop a syllable to make up for the extra syllable in "transmit."