by Playfuls Staff |
13th September 2006
Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Pictures Association of America have reported another major breakthrough in their fight against piracy: the shut down of the popular e-Donkey site.[more]
Moreover, the company that was behind e-Donkey, MetaMachine, agreed to pay RIAA an estimated sum of $30 million, in order to avoid even costlier lawsuits and fines for copyrighted materials distributed illegally through its network.
This comes in handy for RIAA, since similar cases (like Kazaa) involved payments with many zeroes for lawyers, although those payments did pay off in the end. Actually, the entire process of shutting down e-Donkey debuted almost a year ago, when RIAA send warning letters to MetaMachine to stop illegal file sharing on its site. The alternative was of course, the one already avoided- lawsuits.
"With this new settlement, another domino falls, and we have further strengthened the footing of the legal marketplace," Mitch Bainwol, chairman and chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, said in a statement.
The immediate consequences of the agreement are that MetaMachine and its top executives, Sam Yagan and Jed McCaleb, will stop distributing on the e-Donkey site or anywhere else the peer-to-peer clients which helped users exchange files illegally (eDonkey, eDonkey 2000, Overnet and other software versions). Moreover, MetaMachine will take actions to prevent or hinder the illegal file sharing for users who previously downloaded the P2P software.
A federal judge must still give final approval to the terms of the settlement.
Visitors to the eDonkey Web site were greeted with a similar message as that of other formerly illegal P2P services: "If you steal music or movies, you are breaking the law. Courts around the world--including the United States Supreme Court--have ruled that businesses and individuals can be prosecuted for illegal downloading. You are not anonymous when you illegally download copyrighted material. Respect the music, download legally. Goodbye everyone."
Even if e-Donkey’s illegal file sharing was cancelled, it will still exist through e-Mule, which is the open source client for e-Donkey, allowing legal transfer of GPL protected files.
Other P2P operators like BearShare, i2Hub, WinMX, and Grokster have reached similar agreements in the past.
But because many computer users still have functional versions of eDonkey or eMule, it's unlikely the shutdown of eDonkey's business operations will have much of an effect on people swapping files on the eDonkey network, said Eric Garland, head of online entertainment tracking firm BigChampagne Online Media Measurement.
But probably the most important success reported by RIAA and MPAA was the closing of another, even more famous P2P site, Kazaa.
Sharman Networks, the company that owned the popular sharing network Kazaa, had already announced that it will pay $100 million to the main record companies in the music industry.
The announcement was the end for a dispute that lasted for several years between major record companies like Sony BMG, Universal or EMI and Kazaa, the latter producing huge losses by allowing illegal file sharing.
The owners of Kazaa have also announced that they will install filters on the network which will stop the exchange of pirated music files between users. The Kazaa file sharing network, one of the first and most renowned in the world, produced massive financial damages to record companies and also to the Hollywood industry, because of the lack of anti-piracy measures.
In its glory days Kazaa has had more than 4 million active members and its peering software had been downloaded for more than 239 times.
The sum paid by Kazaa (between $115million and $150 million, according to estimates) represents more than half of the legal music market in 2005, which is definitely satisfying for most of the record companies.
