Grokster Shutting Down?

An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo news is reporting that Grokster is shutting down. In a settlement with Hollywood and the music industry Grokster will be permanently banned from 'participating directly or indirectly in the theft of copyrighted files and requires the company to stop giving away its software.'" A continuation on their deal with Mashboxx, or the end of grokster entirely?

Re:Propaganda from the AP

[Wavicle]

IIRC, Grokster lost their case because they advertised themselves as a great way to get movies and music for free. Essentially marketing themselves as a conduit for copyright infringement. So much so that people were confused and actually believed they were downloading the stuff legally. (Don't start on how could someone think that, I won't argue the qualities of human ignorance.)

There are plenty of good uses for P2P. Copyright infringement, while popular, is not a "good" use.

Well, there are other ways..

[Anonymous Coward]

.. such as using your IRC client software to connect to the Undernet IRC network and joining the #mp3_collective and downloading all the free MP3's you want.

• type

  @find *band*name*

  to find the band you want
• type

  @username

  to get a list of his/her files so you can download them

Re:Temporary Victory

[supun]

What do you mean? They get their share from services like iTunes, Napster, and the other legal music download services. Internet stations, like Radio Free Colorado, pay something like $0.07 a song. The RIAA gets their cut of that. So in fact, their business model is changing and not becoming obsolete.

BTW: All those Pepsi adds where they look like they are anti-RIAA make me laugh, since the RIAA made cash from the legal music downloads.

grokster homepage text

[circletimessquare]

http://www.grokster.com/ [grokster.com]

The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed
that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal.
Copying copyrighted motion picture and music files
using unauthorized peer-to-peer services is illegal and is
prosecuted by copyright owners.

There are legal services for downloading music and movies.
This service is not one of them.

Grokster hopes to have a safe and legal service available soon.

If you are interested in that service, go to www.grokster3g.com, or send an email to:

[e-mail]

to be included in the beta for the next generation.

Re:Besides Bittorrent and Usenet....

[varmittang]

eDonkey
Overnet
Emule-kademlia
BitTorrent
Fasttrack (Kazaa, Imesh, Grobster)
FileTP (FTP/HTTP downloads)
Gnutella (Bearshare, Limewire,etc)
Gnutella2 (Shareaza)
Soulseek
Direct-Connect
Opennap

Most of them are accessable by using a MLdonkey client, some are still in the works. MLdonkey Can be found at http://www.nongnu.org/mldonkey/ [nongnu.org]

Re:Grokster is dead

[nicklott]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4413540.stm [bbc.co.uk]

New York Times: Grokster File-Sharing Service Shut

[bartash]

Here is the Grokster story from the NYT [nytimes.com].

See the IP Institute Page for More

[jhsewell]

The University of Richmond's IP Institute web site has more information and links on this story.

http://ipinstitute.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]

Re:Uh-oh... bad wording choice there, Mr. AP

[orasio]

It's not stealing, just because it's not stealing.

Suppose you had a girlfriend (just for the sake of the argument). If someone looks at your girlfriend in a weird way, you cant say it's a rapist. You can make all analogies you want, and say that the guy has X-ray goggles, but some guy who looks at your girlfriend is not f**kin your girlfriend. You can even say that you want him to pay, because she is a stripper, and charges for people looking at her tits, and he is causing you lost revenue.

This is much the same. People who copy songs or movies are not doing anything that they could go to jail for. It's a civil issue. They risk being sued. They are not thieves. They are copyright infringers. It's just another thing, and calling one thing with the name of another thing is not healthy, specially for legal stuff. It ends up contaminating the original concepts. The whole idea of copyright infringement not being theft is that copyright is not something sacred, it's just a "temporary" government granted monopoly, and by infringing that monopoly you might or might not hurt the guy that the monopoly was assigned to, so it's his decission to sue you or not.

Re:Besides Bittorrent and Usenet....

[lowry-kun]

Also new anonymous programs like Mute mute-net.sourceforge.net [slashdot.org] are emerging.

Re:Timeline:

[Maxo-Texas]

There are tens of thousands of musicians talented enough to produce professional music.

Only the lock on distribution channels prevents them from becoming popular.

And that is what this is really all about.

Support alternate music by going to places like "Magnatune.com" where the music is worth what you decide to pay for it and the artists get 50% of the what you pay... not 10% (itune) or 0% (most music contracts actually leave many musicians deeper in debt after a successful album due to funny accounting practices.)