Petteri Pyyny
23 Aug 2001 14:23
Excellent study about FastTrack P2P platform and its legal issues was published today by one of the leading digital multimedia analyst companies, Webnoize. Study opens interesting questions, focusing mostly on the most popular application using FastTrack's technology, MusicCity's Morpheus.
FastTrack, in this case Morpheus, is extremely problematic for copyright owners as Webnoize's study found. While MusicCity controls the access to Morpheus' discussion boards and chat rooms, it doesn't have control over P2P network which is built little bit like Gnutella network (only much, much more cleverly, adding "supernodes" to the network that speed up query times and overall performance), meaning that it doesn't rely on central servers like Napster did. And when company doesn't control the network, can it be sued? Tough question that no one seems to know the answer for.
Read the full study from here (unfortunately requires subscription when the article is archived)
You can also download MusicCity Morpheus from here.