SCOUR EXCHANGE SHUT DOWN November 17 2000 dotmusic.com ... and it's not the only Net music casualty Multimedia search engine company Scour, facing bankruptcy and lawsuits from the music and movie industries, has shut down its controversial file-sharing application Scour Exchange. Around 150,000 users sharing 150 million multimedia files were using Scour Exchange as it powered down on Thursday. The service had about 7 million members. The closure is designed to appease those record labels and movie studios who felt that the application enabled copyright infringement; this, in turn, should allow the company to quickly auction off its assets. Said Dan Rodrigues, company president: "We believe our unilateral decision to take down the Exchange will facilitate a resolution of the copyright infringement litigation pending against Scour... In addition, we expect the shutdown of the Exchange to facilitate a sale of Scour's assets, which will maximise creditor recovery." Two bids are currently on currently on the table. Listen.com, a music search engine owned in part by all five major labels, offered some time ago to buy Scour's technology for $5 million and 527, 918 Listen.com shares. More recently, Oregon-based CenterSpan (which is building a secure file-sharing network featuring digital rights management) revealed plans to beat Listens offer. Scours tale is a far cry from that of Napster, an arguably more illicit and controversial system, which has won millions of dollars in funding and a partnership with Bertelsmann. But is not alone in its plight. As the dot-com pinch takes hold, several music sites have fallen in recent times. Download portal Audiohighway.com was yesterday forced to make 21 of its 30 employees redundant due to falling revenues and a failure to attract more venture funding; webcasting channel iCast announced its intention to close at the start of next year unless a buyer can be found. comment on this article e-mail this to a friend start a discussion [about i-drive] writing index thoughts dotmusic index Problems? Questions? Suggestions? Contact me: mail@tobyslater.com back to top back to home page

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