February 28, 2002

1:44 PM

Morpheus is broken.The Netherlands-based provider of the technology used by Kazaa and Grokster upgrades their system, but leaves out Streamcast Networks' (formerly Music City) Morpheus network, and suddenly, everyone is locked out. Kinda punches a giant hole in their EFF-backed battle with the RIAA, which hinges on the assertion that their network is 'decentralized' and impossible to stop.
posted by pzarquon (12 comments total)

"...will continue to make strides in uniting the P2P world..."

Interpretation: we will centralize decentralized networks, so only if you play by our rules will you continue to have fun. Will will continue to make strides in killing peer to peer networks.

yay.
posted by ZachsMind at 1:59 PM on February 28, 2002

It's working for me.
posted by sadie01221975 at 2:12 PM on February 28, 2002

Kinda punches a giant hole in their EFF-backed battle with the RIAA, which hinges on the assertion that their network is 'decentralized' and impossible to stop.

Yeah, but if Morpheus shut down then that'd punch a giant hole in the RIAA's lawsuit, since there'd be no-one to shut down. Oh, er, I get it now..
posted by wackybrit at 2:31 PM on February 28, 2002

The EFF's argument also hinges on the Supreme Court ruling in the Betamax case that says that "the non-infringing uses of the Betamax machine prevented it from being declared an illegal device itself". Morpheus does have a substantial noninfringing use regardless of the number of people that use it.

The interesting thing to me is how this will all play out across international borders. Will there be countries that don't play ball with WIPO and serve as data havens and exchanges for copyright infringement?

Zachsmind, I'm not sure where you get that idea from. By "uniting the P2P world" they mean that they will decentralize Morpheus and interoperate with Gnutella as is is clearly stated in the paragraph right before the snippet you pulled.
posted by euphorb at 2:38 PM on February 28, 2002

Morpheus does have a substantial noninfringing use regardless of the number of people that use it.

One 'out' that Sony had in Betamax, though, is that there was no possible way to control whether their products were used for infringing purposes or not. In other words, Betamax VCRs don't log into a centralized server every time you put in a tape. That's why copy protections were pushed into the media/tape side... the genie was already out of the bottle for hardware.

The Streamcast/EFF case is still valid under the "non-infringing" criteria, I imagine, but their "we can't control our users" argument is damaged. If the RIAA can prove that Streamcast can control individual use of their product (and if so, perhaps potentially monitor content traded as well), they can probably seek relief in having the courts rule that Streamcast do all it can to stop illegal trading... basically sending them down the dead-end Napster path.
posted by pzarquon at 3:08 PM on February 28, 2002

i logged onto to morpheus the other day and there were only 200 peope online. wierd. then i try again and it worked.
posted by mokey at 3:18 PM on February 28, 2002

[begin tangent]

The DoD story link resulted in a Pcboard ppe flashback for me. Suddenly my system blinked into ansi with Desqview windows and a 640K main memory limit squeezing data across phone lines at 2400 onto my 42 MB hard drive.

Program Nostolgia:
Desqview - the uberhack!
Shez - the compression compainion
QEMM - squeezed blood from a stone or 640 K!

TSRs!

Those were the dAyZ d00d!

[end tangent]
posted by srboisvert at 4:37 PM on February 28, 2002

Copyright violation is a highly moral form of civil disobedience.
posted by Rebis at 11:19 PM on February 28, 2002

Morpheus has now made a new version of its software available. However, it has now severed all ties to the Kazaa network and is instead another - not terribly good - Gnutella client.

Morpheus's home page also seems to allege foul play on the part of Kazaa, suggesting a denial of service attack on their networks linked to the new Kazaa software, registry changes being made on users' systems triggered by Kazaa and a deliberate attempt to lock out Morpheus users with the network upgrade.

There must have been some big falling out between the two companies for it to have come to this. There's been a very long delay in releasing the new Morpheus 2.0 software, which was originally announced for the end of December and was supposed to unite the FastTrack and Gnutella networks. Did Morpheus then change their mind and decide to drop FastTrack support but Kazaa got in first and used their ownership of the core software used in the network to kick out Morpheus and make them look bad?
posted by kerplunk at 7:00 AM on March 2, 2002

Copyright violation is a highly moral form of civil disobedience.

Yes, for every song you download, one starving child in Africa will receive a hot meal. Or something.
posted by kindall at 7:43 AM on March 2, 2002

And how exactly is copyright violation a highly moral form of disobedience? (for real)
posted by aaronshaf at 7:56 AM on March 2, 2002

kerplunk is right. kazaa seem to have been up to no good. they even have a wry banner on their site welcoming morpheus users. but i don't want to download kazaa because of the spyware, just on principal, and i can't find the files i want on gnutella. can anyone suggest good alternatives? i've tried edonkey2000 but can't connect.
posted by mokey at 10:54 AM on March 2, 2002