News has reached that in a wholly predictable manner Morpheus one of the big P2P players of a few years ago, had recently shut down its operations completely.
http://www.p2p-blog.com/item-884.htmlStreamcast Networks has been the company behind the Morpheus file sharing client, and Weiss, Streamcast's long-time CEO, has been an outspoken critic of the entertainment industry as well as lone fighter in an epic legal battle with the major record companies, which is why I was more than a little surprised when he told me that he shut down the company back in April.
Morpheus has been largely ignored by the P2P community in recent years because it was forced to install filters to prevent unauthorized file sharing after losing against the entertainment industry in front of the US Supreme Court. :
Some folks have wondered why Morpheus even resisted that long. Its product was barely usable due to the filters, its user base had shrunk to a minimum, and there was really no light at the end of the tunnel in terms of the legal fight.
The Morpheus website finally closed down this week, leaving almost no trace of the once so popular P2P client.
This is the fate that thus far WinMX users have avoided and we can be thankful that this is still the case but it does bring to focus the fact that without a non proprietory client of some sort to fall back on the networks users could still be the focus of legal terrorism from the deep pocketed recording industry and its lawyers.
To defeat a hammer blow it is only necessary for the ants to scatter in different directions and this is the policy its best to follow when dealing with coporate bullies, they too know this and their efforts are directed at those points where they think they can cause the most carnage, let us never forget they will not rest in their efforts to destroy any network they do not control, we too should not rest in our efforts to resist them.