Morpheus posts

We all had a good little chuckle when Firefox took Antarctica by storm, capturing 100% of the web browser market share. Today the news is not so rosy for bittorrent and peer-to-peer supporters.

The U.S. Antarctic Program has banned their use. From the official communique from the USAP's director of IT and communications:

There are many different Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications: BitTorrent, LimeWire, Gnutella, and KaZaa to name a few more popular ones. Some are used to download legitimate software and media, some illegitimate. None of them are permitted on the USAP enterprise network for both bandwidth and security concerns. P2P applications have the potential to overwhelm the internet connections on the Ice and inadvertently bring malicious software and traffic into the network.

An unhappy USAP employee wrote FreakBits "The gist I got from it was 'because you are all too dumb to use a computer correctly.' At least the plans for my secret uranium mine won't leak out while I'm down here freezing my ass off."

We went poking around the icy continent to see what other Antarcticans thought about the policy.

One penguin speaking on the condition of anonymity told us, "Hey, there are plenty of legitimate uses for bittorrent. It's going to take forever for our Linux group to download new distros now." He added, "We're not all trying to download episodes of The Real Housewives of Orange County like Professor Opposable Thumbs over there."

And he's right. He stinks like greasy fish, but he's right. Bittorrent and peer-to-peer apps aren't the problem. It's inappropriate use and carelessness that's the problem.

The penguins plan on staging a protest later this month, though they refused to announce any details at this point. "We don't want to jeopardize the operation," said our source.

[via FreakBits]

Another one bites the dust folks, well not yet. Morpheus, the p2p file sharing network owned by StreamCast, lost its case in court. The network, like many others is now in danger of being shut down because of copyright infringement charges. LimeWire was similarly sued by the RIAA in August, as well as Grokster, Napster, Kazaa, and many others. Some of these networks have been shut-down, had to shut-down, or have regrouped and come back reborn like Napster. Morpheus still holds out hope for some sort of appeal to work in their favor, but at this point the prospects don't look too good, at least from my small corner of the great and powerful blogosphere. Where Morpheus ends up remains to be seen, and despite their court loss, there seems to be some light at the end of the tunnel at least for consumers, with a few studios and companies starting to see that DRM-less music may be the way to boost sales.