Grokster Closes Its Doors

[GhostShip]

Grokster has gone belly up and decided to quit the fight folks.

http://www.grokster.com/

I,m not sure how this may affect others if they discontinue their pending court activities after having won twice and are currently awaiting a new trail after the supreme court ruling decided there may be a case to answer.

Slycks had this report on their site, nice to know they are watching events  
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=983

Today, Grokster announced it has ceased any and all operations related to its former self.
As part of a settlement agreement with the member companies of the RIAA and MPAA, three years of litigation have come to an end. In addition to other undisclosed aspects of the agreement, Grokster must "permanent injunction prohibiting infringement – directly or indirectly – of any of the plaintiffs’ copyrighted works. This includes ceasing immediately distribution of the Grokster client application and ceasing to operate the Grokster system and software."

Hmm the usual gag order in evidence that allows the cartels to create the impression that they have a stunning victory when often theres been a secret deal and pay off to keep the P2P operators quiet.

[[\/\//¥\\/\/]The Omega]

Thank you Ghost for keeping us posted.        

[GhostShip]

In a rather fast turn around Mashboxx are rumoured to have taken over all groksters assets  

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1883882,00.asp

One day after the Grokster file-sharing service announced a settlement with the recording industry and pulled the plug on its illegal peer-to-peer computing network, sources close to the company confirmed that its assets have been purchased by MashBoxx.

Under the deal, the terms of which were not immediately clear, MashBoxx will buy out all the remaining holdings of Grokster, including its directory of registered users, and fold the file-sharing network's operations into its soon-to-be-launched P2P download service.

Sources said that the two companies actually reached the buyout agreement several months ago, and indicated that MashBoxx Chief Executive Wayne Rosso, a former president of Grokster, facilitated the deal with the recording industry in order to help move his firm's launch plans forward.

On Monday, Grokster filed paperwork in a Los Angeles federal court reporting that it reached a $50 million settlement in its 3-year-old legal case with the nation's largest record companies, motion picture studios and music publishers.

You have to marvel at the amount of times folks can fit words like Mashboxx into a few sentences, I suppose they need the advertising  

This looks to me like a simple pre-planned back door deal as we already suspected, nothing much changes in the world of big business.
Grokster and other companies like Imesh where both rather famous for bringing spyware into folks machines.

The sole reason for targeting of such companies is to recoup any legal expeneses by suing those ones who had gained multiple millions from spreading spyware and had built up substancial assets, so in one way we can thank the RIAA for going after these less that reputable companies, personally I would distance myself from the Grokster name if i was Mashboxx unless of course the new legal services are going to be introducing spy/adware too