by Playfuls Staff |
23rd February 2006
Once again, as it has happened so many times during the last year, illegal file-sharers have received quite a punch from the authorities. Thus, Swiss and Belgian police have shut down a major component of the eDonkey file-sharing network, used mainly to trade copies of copyrighted movies and music, according to the Motion Picture Association.[more]
Razorback 2 was the biggest server on the eDonkey peer-to-peer (P2P) network, which transfers data from user to user. Music companies have blamed P2P piracy for causing a drastic downturn in sales, and Hollywood is trying to prevent a similar impact on the movie business.
"Swiss authorities arrested the site's operator at his residence in Switzerland this morning and searched his home," the MPA said in a statement, cited by Reuters. "At the same time, on the authority of a local magistrate, Belgian police seized the site's servers located at an Internet hosting centre in Zaventem near Brussels."
As of last year, eDonkey was estimated to have up to 3 million users spread over 100 to 200 servers. Razorback2 was the most popular server, used by about 1 million users.
While the music and movie industry have had a string of successes in their fight against online piracy in the last year, raiding P2P servers and winning judgments in court, in many cases users merely migrate to a different network -- a pattern than has happened many times since the original Napster service was shut down.
Even with the shutdown of Razorback2, however, eDonkey isn't likely to disappear any time soon, says Nate Mook for BetaNews. A decentralized method of indexing files on the network called Kademila, or KAD, has begun to pick up steam. The technology has been shown to outperform eDonkey2000's basic system for transferring large files.
In addition, eDonkey has proven resilient to legal attacks in the past. The network's creator, MetaMachine, is facing an RIAA lawsuit and said it was "throwing in the towel" last September. But an open source iteration of the software, known as eMule, continues to be developed and is now in use by the vast majority of eDonkey downloaders.
In testimony to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in September, MetaMachine president Sam Yagan warned that, "The next generation of open P2P applications will travel even further down the road of anonymity and secrecy."
