File-Sharing Firms Feud Over Users
A range war has broken out in the wild, wild West of online file-swapping, with two of the most popular--and arguably illegal--services battling publicly over users.
The battle pits StreamCast Networks’ Morpheus, the leading file-sharing system, against Sharman Networks’ Kazaa.com, No. 2 but gaining. Once joined by a common software, they’re now in splitsville, with Kazaa.com trying to grab Morpheus’ users before the latter runs off to another network.
Laced with intrigue and finger-pointing, the dispute comes as both services are trying to defend themselves against a copyright infringement lawsuit by the music and movie industries. A preliminary hearing in the case is scheduled Monday in federal court in Los Angeles.
At stake is the devotion of millions of consumers who use Morpheus and Kazaa.com to download MP3s, movies, software and other files for free.
Users have downloaded versions of Morpheus’ software more than 53 million times from CNet’s Downloads.com Web site, while Kazaa.com’s software has been downloaded almost 39 million times, according to Downloads.com.
The dispute bubbled to the surface after Morpheus’ network crashed Tuesday. Morpheus’ users couldn’t connect to the FastTrack network that united Morpheus, Kazaa.com and a third file-sharing service, Grokster Ltd.
Steve Griffin, chief executive of Nashville-based StreamCast, said the company supplying the FastTrack software--Kazaa, a Dutch firm and former owner of Kazaa.com--made a new version available to Sharman, which is based in Australia, and Grokster, which is based in the West Indies, but not to Morpheus.
Although Morpheus’ users didn’t lose their connection to Kazaa.com and Grokster immediately, they found themselves cut off from the other services and each other Tuesday.
Derek Broes, chief executive of the Vidius Inc. Internet security firm and an expert on peer-to-peer networks, speculated that computers running the new version of the FastTrack software simply refuse to connect to computers running the old version.
That refusal would have a trickle-down effect, effectively preventing Morpheus’ users with the old software from forming their own network, he said.
Not long after Morpheus crashed, Kazaa.com started trying to convert Morpheus’ users. On Friday, Sharman announced the “Kazaa media desktop migration tool” to let Morpheus’ users transfer their user name and settings to Kazaa.com.
“Many users have already transferred from Morpheus to Kazaa,” Chief Executive Nicola Hemming said in a news release, in part because “they have quickly realized that Kazaa media desktop gives them all Morpheus did and much more.”
Kazaa.com and Morpheus are supported by advertising revenue, which rises or falls with the number of users and the amount of time they spend on the services. And both rely on the “network effect”: the more people who run their software, the more files there are to download and the more attractive they become to new users.
Later on Friday, Morpheus was expected to release a new version of the software that would connect its users to Gnutella, a rival file-sharing network.
Created three years ago by software engineers at an AOL Time Warner Inc. affiliate, the Gnutella approach has fewer adherents because it’s harder to use and much slower than the FastTrack-based systems.
Griffin said Morpheus had planned to let users connect to the millions of file-sharing computers on both FastTrack and Gnutella. “Our goal was to let Morpheus be a unification tool,” he said. “It would appear to me that someone doesn’t like that objective.”
Another possibility is that the separation of U.S.-based Morpheus may give overseas-based Kazaa.com and Grokster some legal advantage in the music and movie industries’ lawsuit, which names all three as defendants.
Grokster executives couldn’t be reached, but Kelly Larabee, a spokeswoman for Kazaa.com, said her company had nothing to do with Morpheus’ network problems.
She added, “We have no reason to have them go away. We’d rather them stay on FastTrack.”
If they left, all their shared files would be lost to Kazaa.com and Grokster users, making those services less attractive.
But analyst P.J. McNealy said it wouldn’t matter in the long run because none of the services were likely to survive the copyright lawsuit.
“I think all these folks are playing in a temporary world because they’re all building their businesses on someone else’s intellectual property. The nuances aren’t that important,” McNealy said.
“They’ve all been sued. And none of the file-sharing services have won because the courts have come down on the side of intellectual property.”
Lawyers for Morpheus and Kazaa.com have argued that they aren’t violating copyright law because there are many legitimate uses for a file-sharing network. Griffin also argues that Morpheus has no control over the network, which he said sustains itself--unless it’s under attack.
