peer-to-peer

Digital music has not been altogether kind to Robin Kent.

Kent was once CEO and chairman of mighty ad agency Universal McCann, but since jumping to digital music, he has had the misfortune of working for one start-up that went bust (SpiralFrog) and another that has done little more than attract controversy (Qtrax). Kent is now walking away from the sector.

On Tuesday, Kent notified associates that after three years working almost exclusively for Qtrax, he will no longer provide consulting services to the much maligned legal peer-to-peer company, which is only available in a few overseas markets. Qtrax has … Read more

A federal court judge has likely dealt a death blow to LimeWire, one of the most popular and oldest file-sharing systems, according to legal experts.

On Wednesday, CNET broke the news that U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood granted summary judgment in favor of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which filed a copyright lawsuit against LimeWire in 2006. In her decision, Wood ruled Lime Group, parent of LimeWire software maker Lime Wire, and founder Mark Gorton committed copyright infringement, induced copyright infringement, and engaged in unfair competition.

"It is obviously a fairly fatal decision for them," … Read more

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has notified nearly 100 organizations that data from their networks has been found on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, the agency said on Monday.

The FTC notices went to private and public entities, including schools and local government agencies and organizations with as few as eight employees to as many as tens of thousands, the FTC said in a statement. The sensitive information about customers and employees that was leaked could be used to commit identity fraud, conduct corporate espionage, and for other crimes.

The FTC did not name the organizations involved. It said it has … Read more

As we close the book on 2009 and ready for 2010, a legal settlement takes us back to 2007 and 2008, when Comcast got into trouble with customers and the feds for throttling peer-to-peer traffic on its network.

Comcast has agreed to pay $16 million to end to a class action lawsuit alleging the broadband provider promised and advertised certain download and upload speeds, but blocked peer-to-peer traffic on its high-speed Internet network.

"Comcast denies these claims, but has revised its management of P2P and is settling to avoid the burden and cost of further litigation," according to … Read more

Updated at 5:10 p.m. PDT with eBay comment.

Joltid, a peer-to-peer software company established by Skype's founders, filed a copyright suit against Skype Wednesday alleging Joltid's technology is being infringed on by Skype users "in the United States at least 100,000 times each day."

Just the latest in an ongoing license dispute between the popular VoIP service and its developers, the lawsuit, filed in Northern California U.S. District Court, seeks an injunction and damages, which Joltid "reasonably believes are amassing at a rate of $75 million daily," according to the … Read more

The heads of the UK's largest ISPs have co-signed a letter of protest against the proposal to disconnect suspected illegal file-sharers from their broadband service.

The open letter was sent to The Times on Thursday by the chiefs of TalkTalk, BT, and Orange, as well as representatives of the Open Rights Group and the consumer choice organizations Which and Consumer Focus.

It coincided with a detailed argument against the government's proposals, issued as a statement by the Featured Artists Coalition (FAC), the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (Basca) and the Music Producers Guild (MPG).

The signatories … Read more

Wayne Rosso, formerly CEO of Grokster, founder of Maxxbox, and outspoken critic of the Recording Industry Association of America, recently joined Global Gaming Factory, the soon-to-be owner of file-sharing legend The Pirate Bay.

In an interview with CNET's Digital Media blog, Rosso outlined what turns out to be an extremely innovative cloud-computing business model.

The only question is, will it work?

In the interview, Rosso outlines a plan in which The Pirate Bay customers could pay a monthly fee for music service, but could reduce that cost by contributing storage capacity to a commercially available Storage-as-a-Service offering:

For example, a person may dedicate a gig of (storage) space to the network and the fee may go from $9 to $5. (Rosso declined to discuss pricing yet so the numbers are made up just for the example).

"The more of your computer resources you contribute to the network, the less you pay down to zero," Rosso said. "The user is in control."

In other words, The Pirate Bay aims to be the first commercial peer-to-peer storage cloud that separates how capacity is acquired from how it is sold. This is extremely interesting, because it means it can sell one service to a consumer audience (music and video), and another entirely different service to business (storage services).… Read more

The main investigative committee in the U.S. House of Representatives has reopened a probe of Lime Wire and other peer-to-peer file-sharing companies over the issue of "inadvertent sharing." The move comes nearly two months after it was alleged that Iran took advantage of a computer security breach to obtain information about President Barack Obama's helicopter.

CNET News has obtained copies of the letters written by the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission asking them for help investigating the recent rash of security breaches caused when people … Read more

This story has been updated. See below for details.

The Conficker worm is finally doing something--updating via peer-to-peer between infected computers and dropping a mystery payload on infected computers, Trend Micro said on Wednesday.

Researchers were analyzing the code of the software that is being dropped onto infected computers but suspect that it is a keystroke logger or some other program designed to steal sensitive data off the machine, said David Perry, global director of security education at Trend Micro.

The software appeared to be a .sys component hiding behind a rootkit, which is software that is designed to hide … Read more