eranros used our news submit to tell us that iMesh has been sued for copyright infringement by eighteen music labels. iMesh is the 2nd most popular peer-to-peer tool downloaded off of Download.Comand uses a hybrid of peer-to-peer protocols including fast-track as used in Kazaa. As iMesh is severely crippled with adware and ad-supported software such as GAIN, it is not is not popular with the more experienced users who are against the unwanted extras.
The lawsuit filed against iMesh charges the company for serving it as a medium for the illegal distribution of copyrighted media. The lawsuit has a quote saying that iMesh would not exist if it were not used for the widespread distribution of copyrighted music. The lawsuit follows after iMesh said in late August that it plans to sell copyrighted music using through its software while still providing the existing file sharing service.
Tel Aviv-based iMesh is the third-largest file-sharing network behind Morpheus and the much larger the KaZaa service. These networks let millions of users around the world trade software, music and video over the Internet. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, charges the company with serving as a medium for the illegal distribution of copyrighted material. Quoting from the text of the lawsuit, the paper wrote, "Without widespread infringement of the most popular copyrighted sound recordings," iMesh "would disappear." The legal actions come after iMesh said in late August it planned to sell copyrighted music from independent artists, films and games, alongside its file-swapping operations. At the time, iMesh chief executive Elan Oren told Reuters the company had no intentions to abandon its file-sharing operations. |
The music industry is running out of peer-to-peer companies to go after. With iMesh running for several years now, it is quite surprising that they have not been a target of a lawsuit long ago. With a previous lawsuit failing on Morpheus and Grokster, it is not surprising that they are targeting individual users who share music. Should the "Senator Brownback" bill be enforced, that should prevent or reduce this sort of abuse from the RIAA as well as from other copyright holders. WinMX and eDonkey seem to be the only remaining popular P2P tools where the companies behind the tools have not been targets of a lawsuit.
Source: Reuters - New York
