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eDonkey Pays the Recording Industry $30M
ColinPL writes, "MetaMachine Inc., the firm behind online file-sharing software eDonkey, has agreed to pay $30 million to avoid potential copyright infringement lawsuits from the recording industry. The company also agreed to take measures to prevent file sharing by people using previously downloaded versions of the eDonkey software. The eDonkey application now displays the message, 'The eDonkey2000 Network is no longer available. Please see eDonkey.com for more details.' After that message is displayed the uninstaller is launched automatically." If you visit edonkey.com, it logs your IP address. How much will the demise of eDonkey matter, given that most who access that P2P network do so using the open-source eMule?
eDonkey's IP records are useless in any sort of legal action and will be so tainted by random internet traffic such as that generated by SlashDot that I will mock any fool who attempts to use that data in any productive way, targetted advertisement excepted.
On another note, a patch will be made for eDonkey within the day to allow all three people who still want to use the eDonkey network to do so. If there was some indexing server or such shut down by this, a new one will be emulated, and aforementioned patch will redirect queries to aforementioned emulated server.
The use of P2P sharing really puts a strain on networks. It's not only illegal, but it hurts everyone else using the network especially if your admin doesn't have some type of QOS implemented (there are always ways around this). I come to this conclusion after administrating a network of 300 university students for 3 years.