The German subsidiary of the IFPI claims a big success over an operator of edonkey servers. After achieving several preliminary injunctions, the operator was forced to shutdown his servers which - according to the IFPI - led to a big impact on the edonkey network since these were among the biggest available nodes. This makes a total of 16 edonkey servers that had to be shutdown this year. Several preliminary injunctions against other edonkey server operators are due to be send out during the following days.
While in Germany the operators cannot be sued for copyright infringement directly, they are usually accused for supporting illegal activities. However it is unclear which tactics were used by the IFPI this time.
With the availability of Kademlia and source exchange in recent versions of eMule, one can highly doubt that the shutdown of some servers - even the bigger ones - will have a big impact on file sharing with eMule at all. Please let us know if you suffer from bad performance with this filesharing network - you probably won't.
