EDonkey still brays despite being "shut down"

THE EARLIER NEWS of Limewire's legal wranglings with the RIAA pricked my ears up, and reminded me of something I'd meant to look into. How had the world of file sharing changed since the RIAA so gloriously shut down EDonkey and forced its owner MetaMachine to close and pay $30 million in costs?

The ED2K network does not have a single group of centrally-run servers that can be shut down, and there are multiple clients that can connect to it, most famously the 5-year old open sauce EMule, hosted on SourceForge, so I was sceptical as to how well this block would work.

Having googled Emule and downloaded the latest version (0.47c), I fired up the program which quickly found around 150 active servers, and connected to "Big Bang", an ED2K host with multiple servers and a website proudly shouting about their business.

So had the RIAA closure had an effect? I looked for a Billboard Top 10 hit, as they're the sort of thing of which the RIAA would most want to cut down on the sharing. According to Billboard.com, in top place in both lists is Justin Timberlake with the single "sexyback" and the album "futuresex/lovesounds". I despair, I really do. It's as if he's been watching a Nissan Micra advert where two words are combined to form new depths of suckiness.

Anyway, in the interest of science, I clicked search. As you will probably have guessed, this would not be worthy of a story if it had returned a message informing me that they were unavailable because of copyrighting issues. And it didn't - 610 identical copies of a 5MB MP3 of the single, 84 of the video, and 150 individual files, plus 116 perfect copies of the same RAR version of the 2CD album.

Needless to say, as I'd rather stick a mould-covered spork into my eyeball than listen to Justin Timberlake, I didn't proceed with the download. However, with the servers reporting over 18.3 million users logged on and 2.2 billion files shared at the time of press, there are clearly those who do still actively fileshare over the "closed" ED2K network, so it rather puts the RIAA's bold statements about the legal result such as ""With this new settlement, another domino falls" into context.

On a side note, I discovered the incredible musician Raul Midon in a YouTube video the other day (illegal, no doubt), and bought his CD from Amazon because of this free marketing. On receiving the CD, I discovered it was not actually a CD, as it was one of these god-awful copy-protected abortions which don't play in my computer (without installing some proprietary software) and hence don't play on my hifi, can't be downloaded to my MP3 player, and don't play in my car. So that's useful then.

Number of CDs I bought in the days of regular, easy file sharing and music discovery: around 300 at last count. Number of CDs bought in last two years: about 10. Number of CDs I'll buy now that I can't use them: zero. Good luck to the Limewire chaps, I say. However, for now at least, ED2K is still standing and braying, so the RIAA will have to do much better if they insist on trying to get it shut down. µ

See Also
eDonkey's ass is shut
Limewire countersues RIAA