AfterDawn: News

Music and film studios reported on Wednesday that they have filed copyright lawsuits against companies providing FastTrack -based services. Grokster Ltd., MusicCity.com Inc., MusicCity Networks Inc. and Consumer Empowerment BV were sued by roughly 30 companies ranging from Walt Disney Co. to Capitol Records.

The FastTrack -based services are much like Napster - only alot bigger. In addition to music, also video and software titles can be exchanged on the service. What makes the peer-to-peer sharing services even more frustrating to record labels is the fact that they are opening their own digital music services, e.g. MusicNet and Pressplay, soon.



``We cannot sit idly by while these services continue to operate illegally, especially at a time when new legitimate services are being launched,'' said Hilary Rosen, president of the Recording Industry Association of America.

FastTrack has also been accused of having more control over the network than what they've lead to believe. A couple of open-source FastTrack clients appeared on the scene only to be blocked by FastTrack only days later. This indeed rose quite a few eyebrows about the peer-to-peer nature of the network. If certain clients can be blocked from the network then the entire network can be controlled by FastTrack. Which in turn means that the service can indeed be shutdown.

Source:
Yahoo! News


Written by: Jari Ketola @ 3 Oct 2001 15:07