New Morpheus, now with extra BitTorrent

StreamCast Networks, one of the peer to peer software companies whose future is at stake in next week's scheduled Supreme Court ruling on file-swapping, has released a new version of its Morpheus software.

Like previous versions, the software is run by the company's Neonet technology, a relatively advanced way of locating files on the network. Unlike other versions, StreamCast says it has stripped out any third-party bundled adware. Instead, the company will support itself by banner ads and paid search results, similar to Google's model.

This paid peer-to-peer search model is getting many tips of the hat recently, with a new company called Gnutelligence also trying to inject sponsored results into file-swapping searches. As the Kazaa-allied Altnet has shown, this can be a tough business, however.

Boasting a brand-new interface, the Morpheus 5.0 client is also keeping the ability to search for BitTorrent files, a capability added earlier this year.