WinMX Suspends Operations

An anonymous reader writes "Slyck.com is reporting that it appears the WinMX network has shut down its operations in response to the RIAA's letters threating legal action. Although the WinMX network is currently down, this may only be temporary as developers seem to have relocated from Canada to Port Villa, Vanuatu."

Tax haven? Not for long.....

[CDMA_Demo]

Sure it is very interesting. But I wonder what will happen if every p2p company takes refuge in Vanuatu. The laws specifically prohibit pornography and don't even think about applying if you've got money laundering on your mind. U.S. can easily pressurize a country of the size of Republic of Vanuatu to extend their laws to prohibit sharing copyright work!

Re:Are they planning to live there too?

[twiddlingbits]

yep, and Joe User can still be sued for downloading the "pirated" movies/music/games/etc. no matter WHERE they got it. Just a thought, you know if they had did this with P*rn during the early days of the 'Net the things we have now would have taken a lot longer to get here. It's a fact that early adopters (and improvers) of technology have been those on the "dark side" such as P*rn and Gambling.

United Nations of RIAA

[spyrochaete]

I used WinMX for a while, as it was much more featureful than the crappy Napster client of old and the subscribership was outstanding. I don't seem to remember any feature or message in WinMX that helped users pirate music. It's true that some people used the software to trade music, but there is absolutely no proof that the program was designed for that purpose. I don't know why they took the network down. It is a simple P2P file sharing utility and nothing more.

Furthermore, WinMX is freeware. I presume the author made no money from it. Regardless, why is the RIAA challenging this poor guy on the grounds that he has broken another country's laws?

Re:You have to catch them first.

[MightyMartian]

If they obfuscate their identity, and if the foreign country won't cooperate, then good luck prosecuting them.

"We have every reason to believe that this tiny island country is harboring terrorist agents of Al-qaeda, and is developing weapons of mass destruction to threaten its neighbors with."

Re:Tax haven? Not for long.....

[JabberWokky]

How? I work for many companies in dinky countries (news services and publishers -- legit businesses). They have plenty of corruption internally, but there's really no toehold that the United States has on them. If they are making money through companies arriving, they aren't going to change things. They are masters of their little corner of the world and they like it; many have just shrugged off European absentee rulers and are quite enamored with their own sovernity. You'd be surprised how little influence the United States has in some of these countries.

Many people in first world countries think they carry the biggest stick and the sun sets on their ass. They'd be surprised that the population and rulers of the many very capable small countries don't see it that way.

--
Evan

Re:Reminiscence

[bobbyshade]

i've been useing winmx for several years and it has worked well for my purposes. one of the key features was that it allowed you to log onto a large choice of "open nap" networks, and it was there i found what i was looking for. folks, who like myself, ripped old records and digitized then. i just cked and i am still hooked up with six open naps and have traffic up and down. to find a client for open nap ck source forge and search on open nap.

Re:There is NOTHING the RIAA or the USA can do

[cianduffy]

Considering they're bound to be owned by anybody BUT the government (its only in places like the US, UK, Ireland etc where the state actually owns significant amounts of the fibre), some ISP's insurance somwhere would have the resources to fix them, yes.

Re:Pertinent Links:

[shark72]

"It should be especially hilighted that Kazaa has already moved to Vanuatu, so the island clearly has decent internet connectivity in place already."

Just to be clear... that's where Sharman Networks is headquartered for tax purposes. They don't have servers there. There are probably a dozen outfits on Vanuatu that'll set up a PO box for you and forward your mail.

Running afoul of the Berne Convention or local copyright laws was probably never a reason for Sharman's setting up in Vanuatu -- you can generally be nailed in any country in which you do business, regardless of the address printed on your articles of incorporation.

Re:As a Vanuatu-based geek...THEN HELP US

[Nom du Keyboard]

Second, the information on wikipedia.org is far from complete - and in some cases, inaccurate.

Then help us out and update the Wikipedia. That's what the whole thing is all about!

Re:I agree...

[Jugalator]

For starters, why not make a trackerless bittorrent-like network? Oh well, back to the land of unicorns and castles in the air. :(

Trackerless torrents are already supported [bittorrent.com], even in the official client.

If you're asking for a eDonkey-like thing with BitTorrent as the underlying protocol instead of the FastTrack network, that already exist too in the form of eXeem [exeem.com].

However, from my experiences, it's about as good as eDonkey in efficiency. That's the problem with less centralized networks. Since it's so easy to just seed yourself, people start seeding 20 copies of seemingly the same thing, where half of them were maybe misnamed torrents, and the rest 10 are forming groups of 5 instead of one group of 50, causing the speed to be about 10% of that on a centralized and more controlled tracker.

Also because such UI's basically encourages seeding and downloading from multiple sources, a lot of users may seed 5 things at once and leech from 10, and you run into eDonkey's problems with unfocused transfers. You think "yay, I found something with 20 sources", and then you see each source had about 2 kbps to spare for that specific torrent, since it's so easy for those to just start a lot of different downloads at once.

Re:You have to catch them first.

[SillyNickName4me]

Even when being half serious, one can be insightfull I would say.

And regardless, what grantparent post said points at a problem that is real and very serious, and that a substantial part of the US population is refusing/unable to see. Should I just conclude from your post that you are among that group?

Re:Tax haven? Not for long.....

[Alsee]

if every p2p company takes refuge in Vanuatu...
extend their laws to prohibit sharing copyright work!

First of all you are making the FALSE assumption that P2P companies are sharing copyrighted works. P2P software companies no more "share copyrighted works" than E-mail software companies "share copyrighted works". In fact e-mail software is one of the original forms of P2P software.

Secondly, aside from the extensive body of copyright free materials, you are making a blanket assumption that sharing copyrighted works is inherently improper. There is also an extensive body of copyrighted works that are authorized for unrestricted or conditional distribution. If you want to complain about people who commit copyright infringment, well ok fine. However these companies are not commiting copyright infringment.

P2P software - including EMAIL - can be used to send or receive anything. E-mail and FTP and webserver software are all explicitly designed to distribute files. Software authors and software publishers should not be under assault.

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