Morpheus

» see morpheus.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Morpheus started in August 2001 under StreamCast Networks, then operating as MusicCity. The first version was a FastTrack client, which was the same network Kazaa used. For a few months in late 2001 and early 2002 it was the most-downloaded program on CNET. Napster had just been shut down, and Morpheus had no bundled spyware at a time when Kazaa came stacked with it. The good run ended in February 2002 when FastTrack's owner locked Morpheus out of the network for refusing to pay licensing.

StreamCast rebuilt the client on Gnutella within a few weeks. It kept users for a while, but the new network was a clear downgrade on speed and search quality. Later versions tried to bridge several networks at once including BitTorrent and a proprietary StreamCast layer called NeoNet. The product never recovered its 2002 mindshare. By the time the company was in court, Morpheus was running fourth or fifth in the P2P category behind Kazaa and eDonkey.

I never used Morpheus. By the time the brand was visible from Turkey, the Turkish P2P crowd had already settled on Kazaa Lite (the de-adwared community fork), and switching clients required a reason no one had. I read about Morpheus through CNET and through the news coverage of the lawsuit. The first time I downloaded a Morpheus installer was years later, when I was already on broadband and the brand had become a curiosity rather than a tool.

~ the dossier ~

~ the lawsuit ~

StreamCast was the lead defendant in MGM Studios v Grokster, the 2005 Supreme Court case that produced the active-inducement doctrine. The ruling went unanimously against the defendants. Grokster shut down within five months. StreamCast did not, partly because the company kept arguing that its software had substantial non-infringing uses, and partly because there was no settlement money left to pay. The case kept generating legal bills for three more years.

~ how it ended ~

On April 22, 2008, StreamCast Networks filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The official site morpheus.com went offline by late October along with musiccity.com and streamcastnetworks.com. Users who tried to launch the client got a network-not-found error. The Morpheus brand had spent its last three years more as a name on court filings than as software anyone opened on purpose. The community fork that the WinMX people built had no equivalent for Morpheus, because by 2008 nobody was looking back.

~ what got buried with it ~

Morpheus is one of the cleanest case studies in P2P-company brittleness. It depended on a network it did not own, then got cut off when the network owner decided so. The replacement product depended on a legal posture the Supreme Court demolished four years later. By 2008 the bankruptcy filing was a formality. The actual file-sharing audience had been on BitTorrent for two years.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »