According to court documents filed today MetaMachine, the company behind eDonkey, has agreed to pay a $30 million dollar settlement to the RIAA and cease distribution of its eDonkey, eDonkey 2000, Overnet and other software versions.
A message left for users on the eDonkey site reads:
The eDonkey2000 Network is no longer available.
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.
Your IP address is XX.XXX.XX.XXX and has been logged.
Respect the music, download legally.
Goodbye Everyone.
I’m glad I was routing my connection through a proxy server, for as you see above they’ve even begun logging the IP addresses of visitors to the site. Though this of course means nothing really, I still don’t like notion of being “logged” by anyone, especially if it will be wrapped up in a fancy 3-ring binder as a present to the RIAA alongside the stacks of settlement money.
A recent user had this to say about trying to connect to the eDonkey servers :
It’s been reported by multiple users that the edonkey client now refuses to start.
It (sic) dialog opens saying that the network has been shut down.
If you click the OK button on that (sic) dialog your edonkey client then tries to uninstall itself.
This is not a hack. This self-destruct message is coming from the edonkey server themselves.
It’s a http message being sent to your client in the opening web page.
The work around is to disconnect your network connection, start edonkey, and let it fail to connect then reconnect your network.
There are very few users who are on the network right now because if they were foolish enough to click the OK to uninstall button there edonkye client is gone.
The edonkey forums are also down and there are no message on the main page regarding this shutdown.
Another user in the Zeropaid forums writes:
“You can keep the official client and block their site, or maybe get Edonkey Lite. Since MetaMachine is co-operating with the authorities, some might prefer a clean version. It doesn’t seem to have any spyware.”
This decision by eDonkey comes on the heels of recent settlements by BearShare, i2Hub, WinMX, and Grokster with the RIAA in recent months.
In addition to agreeing to cease distribution of it’s various eDonkey software they have also agreed to take measures “…to prevent file-sharing by people using previously downloaded versions.”
Mitch Bainwol, chairman and chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, commented that “With this new settlement, another domino falls, and we have further strengthened the footing of the legal marketplace.”
According to the settlement agreement between the RIAA and MetaMachine there doesn’t appear to be much of a future in the file-sharing realm for eDonkey or MetaMachine.
It reads:
[The defendants...] shall be permanently enjoined and restrained from directly, indirectly, contributory or vicariously infringing in any many any copyright in any and all sound recording and other copyrighted works…”
[The defendants...] shall be permanently enjoined and restrained from directly or indirectly, or assisting in or supporting the operation of, any copter server or website, or distributing any software, in any way related to the eDonkey System or Software or any other peer to peer or file-trading network or their network, service or medium [that encourages copyright infringement.]
[The defendants...] shall be permanently enjoined and restrained from directly or indirectly releasing [the eDonkey source code or technology.]
The defendants are also prohibited from selling or transferring any significant part of the MetaMachine business or other assets without the consent of the Court, as well as waive their right to appeal.
Last fall seven P2P firms were sued by the RIAA and with this “defeat” of eDonkey it leaves only BitTorrent, Warez P2P, Limewire, and Soulseek as the last firms to reach a settlement.
Yet, once again this will have the effect of merely pushing people to different file-sharing methods like BitTorrent, thus once again opening up a whole new can of worms for the lawyers at the RIAA.
BitTorrent torrent sites & search engines
TorrentBoss.com is a new torrent caching site that tracks and caches torrents from popular trackers. TorrentBoss is like Google in that it only links to .torrent metafiles and takes a cache of such files. None of the data transferred by or stored on TorrentBoss servers is content linked to by .torrent files.
Zeropaid Guides to BitTorrent Downloading
Azureus – A Beginner’s Guide to BitTorrent Downloading Creating torrents with Azureus
uTorrent – A Beginner’s guide to BitTorrent downloading
Downloading Files on the Go with uTorrent
Improving BitTorrent Download Speeds
Discuss eDonkey in the Zeropaid forums
Excerpt from the forums:
“You can keep the official client and block their site, or maybe get Edonkey Lite. Since MetaMachine is co-operating with the authorities, some might prefer a clean version. It doesn’t seem to have any spyware.”
Related
- eDonkey Second P2P To Toss In File-Sharing Towel
- eDonkey BETA HYBRID released
- Shareaza’s beta version Good or Bad for Edonkey?
- The End of eDonkey
- Pay for eDonkey Bot in future?
If i had 30 million and i knew i might lose it i would leave the country with it before the court case happened and never return
)
Knew it was coming. And mels said private bt would fall this year. HA
Reason number 9 million and one why it’s time to switch to BT…….
does this mean in sharaza that they will log my IP if im connecting to the edonkey networks or just the website?
just the website……..
O.K. once again YOU CAN’T GET IN TROUBLE FOR DOWNLOADING. So that message is bogus. You get into trouble for UPloading. That’s the “illegal distribution” part of it. Of course if people don’t upload there would be no files. Secondly as pointed out by many as soon as one client gets taken down several others pop up or “lite” versions appear. Thirdly even if the RIAA is successful in eliminating every form of file sharing (which I doubt will EVER happen) they have lost my business for ever. And I’m sure that I’m not alone.
You can still download working older versions of both eDonkey2000 and Overnet from http://www.oldversion.com
u no wut tho emule is the shit!
no no IP logging on edonky because of this shut down.
“especially if it will be wrapped up in a fancy 3-ring binder as a present to the RIAA alongside the stacks of settlement money.”
You’re right P2P is the best thing that ever happened to the RIAA and the lawyers that work for them they sue thousands of people for thousands of dollars every day. It sucks.
“Reason number 9 million and one why it’s time to switch to BT……. ”
Yeah except BT makes harvest IP address easier than ever just connect to the torrent and you immediately get hundred of IP addresses in the swarm AND it’s impossible to download without uploading.
It’s safe to assume your IP address is logged no matter what P2P you use.
IP logging is pointless in the UK as the address are merely provider and change everytime you log on anyway and the IP themselves find it impossible to keep a proper record.
Emule is running superbly and the older version of edonkey is still connecting but with far fewer clients online.
The US supreme court ruling is joke to and doesn’t mean anything to the former soviet block the chinese koreans Iraqis belize Cuba ……..I would thought there will be a few P2P host servers located in these places.
I’m in england …. what are they going to do ? sue me? lol!