dive into mark

Slashdot: Kazaa Admits to Morpheus Shutdown. Their reason? The company didn’t pay its bills. Meanwhile, Slashdotters are wondering if this move screws Kazaa’s defense in the lawsuit brought against them by the RIAA. Kazaa claims that it has no control over their network. This is obviously false, since they intentionally locked out millions of users. It may be true that they have no control over the content traded on their network, but they could certainly comply with a judge’s order to shut the network down (because they control the authentication mechanism for users to log into the network in the first place). Oops.

Meanwhile, Morpheus is back on its feet with a rebranded version of Gnucleus (a GPL Gnutella client) called “Morpheus Preview Edition”. Morpheus has complied with all the legal requirements of the GPL (here’s the source code), but they haven’t really added anything except popup ads. Morpheus users should “upgrade” to Gnucleus instead.

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