Nighthawk used our newssubmit a while ago to let us know about 2 brothers who face prosecution for their Napster made program: Sea of Sound. Besides a lawsuit they also face criminal charges of copyright violation.
 The Yang brothers, who face up to five years in jail and up to $38,500 in fines if convicted, are fighting the charges. |
"We aren't gangsters," said Jung-hwan, who lives and works with his brother in their parents' apartment and who majored in computer science at Columbia University in New York. Il-hwan studied the same at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., "We wanted South Korea to have its own Napster."
Unlike Napster, the Soribada software does not rely on central servers to index the files that users share. Similar to the Gnutella program, the Korean-language program enables users to tap into an ever-changing peer-to-peer network with other song-swappers, search each others' computers for MP3 music files and download them.
Launched a year ago, Soribada was bound to be a hit: nearly half of South Korea's 46 million people access the Internet, one of the world's highest rates, and high-speed connections that enable a 10-second file transfer for a typical song are widespread.
Of course they are fighting it. The RIAA is already on it saying that local labels lost $154 million in album sales last year. Yeah right.
In the US Napster first had a trial before it was killed. The Korean recording association insists that Soribada shut down before any negotiations at all.
Their page is still online, and you can still download it (if you know korean ).
Source: usatoday
