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RIAA & MPAA targets Morpheus

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  • RIAA & MPAA targets Morpheus

    Bad news for us Morpheus users.
    Still, I got DIVX copies of the Life of Brian and Quest for the Holy Grail from it for evaluation at least, and once I get around to watching them I'll be sure to delete them afterwards.

    The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition -- October 4, 2001
    Media & Marketing

    Entertainment Industry Sues to Curtail Web Music-Sharing System Morpheus

    By LEE GOMES
    Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

    The entertainment industry opened a new front in its war on online piracy by filing a lawsuit against an increasingly popular Web file-sharing system called Morpheus.

    The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, says that
    Morpheus is picking up where Napster Inc., now shut down while it refashions itself as a legal operation, left off.

    But unlike Napster, whose operations were curbed by the music industry's court action, Morpheus bills itself as a decentralized, or "peer to peer," system with no central computer, but instead, a constantly changing collection of personal computers belonging to the people logged on to the service at any one time.

    In their lawsuit, though, a number of record labels and Hollywood studios represented by the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America say that the Morpheus service indeed uses central server computers for such tasks as keeping track of who is online.
    Those central machines, said Matt Oppenheimer, vice president for legal affairs for the record-industry group, "make the system more efficient."

    Largely on account of that efficiency -- users say Morpheus is nearly as good as Napster was in its heyday -- use of Morpheus has exploded in recent months.
    According to Webnoize, a Cambridge, Mass., research outfit, nearly a million people at a time were using Morpheus last month -- nearly double the number from August -- and they downloaded more than 1.5 billion files, both music and full-length movies.

    The lawsuit names MusicCity.com Inc.(www.musiccity.com) and MusicCity Networks of Franklin, Tenn., which operate the Morpheus service, along with several smaller companies. The companies didn't return calls seeking comment.

    While the record industry was largely successful in going after Napster, legal observers say it will have a tougher time in taking on Morpheus and other "peer to peer" systems, such as the Gnutella network. While Napster's founders made it clear in internal communications during the service's early days that the purpose of the software was to exchange music, the creators of most peer-to-peer systems have been careful to describe their software as general technology capable of exchanging all manner of files, including many legal ones.

    What's more, peer-to-peer file systems are likely to claim in court that they have "substantial noninfringing" uses, which under a U.S. Supreme Court doctrine, could give them the kind of legal protection Napster lacked.
    Athlon XP-64/3200, 1gb PC3200, 512mb Radeon X1950Pro AGP, Dell 2005fwp, Logitech G5, IBM model M.
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