It looks like another company are resigning their network to the demands of the anti-sharing organisation ( RIAA )
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=931Sam Yagan, the president of MetaMachine will make a few serious concessions at today's 9:30 AM hearing. No, MetaMachine is not closing down, however the applied mathematics major and graduate of Harvard and Stamford universities will concede to the RIAA's demands.
The RIAA, an organization that represents over 90% of all record labels and all four major record labels, began a letter writing campaign on the 13th of this month. In the letter, which was sent to most of the major P2P developers, the RIAA demanded they cease the encouragement of copyright infringement or face litigation.
"We demand that you immediately cease-and-desist from enabling and inducing the infringement of RIAA member sound recordings. If you wish to discuss pre-litigation resolution of these claims against you, please contact us immediately."
The cease and desist letters were also suspected of being sent to MetaMachine, BearShare, WinMX, LimeWire and Ares Galaxy. Developers have established their own methods of dealing with the issue, however none have publicly announced such method. That is until MetaMachine’s Sam Yagan.
This is a double blow to the company coming hot on the heels of a german court decision to outlaw linking to file hashes
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/64375Offering eDonkey links to copyrighted material constitutes a violation of copyright law
Regarding the lawsuit in which the Motion Picture Association of America sought a temporary injunction against the Swiss-hosted website The-Realworld.de (TRW) the opinion of the court has now been made public. Thus in its decision of July 15 2005 the District Court in Hamburg came to the following conclusion: The making available of "edited" links which allow the downloading of installments of TV series via the Internet file-exchange network eDonkey constitutes a violation of the German Copyright Act (UrhG). Anzeige
Well with all the legal chicanery going on here I suppose its the only course of action for anyone to take.
Myself I would sugget a counter suit on behalf of all independent artists and media producers, what right do these file nazis have over people using the network to distribute there own work ?
Are we all going to stand by when they burn the books too ?
