PEER-TO-PEER NEMESIS CLOSES

One of the music industry's nastier attempts to spike the popularity of peer-to-peer technology, the company Overpeer, has been closed down before it bleeds its parent company Loudeye dry.

Overpeer tried to make filesharing impossible through flooding the p2p networks with fake files - the idea being that it would make it too much like hardwork to find usable unlicensed files, causing people to give up and shuffle off down to HMV. It looks like at least one of the major labels had decided this idea was a bit shit:

In a financial filing, Loudeye said the ratings systems that many peer-to-peer networks had introduced to give users information about authentic and fake files had reduced Overpeer's effectiveness.

Explaining the decision to close Overpeer, Loudeye said in a statement with industry regulators that the subsidiary had lost a major client in mid-2005 and it had steadily been generating less and less cash.

Of course, the "customers" of the company would say there was nothing more dubious in their behaviour than that of the people they were attacking, but you have to wonder - if they weren't uncertain what they were doing was morally defensible, how come you never heard the RIAA trilling away about their members pouring cash into what, eventually, turned out to be a futile gesture?

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