Overnet

2002 - 2006

dead

the network under the network. overnet was metamachine's own client for the edonkey world, a serverless layer meant to route around the central servers that made edonkey easy to sue. most people ran emule instead and never touched it. the grokster ruling reached the whole family anyway, and a $30 million settlement in 2006 pulled overnet down with the rest.

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

~ the last words ~

I remember the eDonkey network from the university years, when a big download meant leaving a machine on overnight and checking the queue in the morning. What I do not remember is Overnet, and that is the whole story of it. Overnet was MetaMachine's own client, the one the company built, and almost everyone I knew ran eMule instead.

Overnet arrived around 2002 as a serverless design, a way to keep the eDonkey world running without the central index servers that made the network so easy for lawyers to point at. It was a smart idea and, for a homegrown client competing with a free open-source rival, a losing one. eMule did the same job for free and had the community behind it.

The end did not care which client you used. In June 2005 the US Supreme Court decided in the Grokster case that a company selling software built for infringement could be held liable for it. A cease and desist letter reached MetaMachine that September, and by September 2006 the company had settled with the RIAA for $30 million and agreed to stop distributing eDonkey and Overnet for good.

~ the record ~

Born	2002, a serverless P2P client
Peak	the decentralized layer over the eDonkey network
Killed	September 2006, RIAA settlement
Lifespan	about four years
Made by	MetaMachine (Jed McCaleb and Sam Yagan)
Killed by	the Grokster ruling and a $30 million settlement

~ what it was ~

Overnet mattered less as a product than as an idea about where the pressure was going. Central servers were the weak point, the thing a court order could switch off, so the design tried to remove them. The eDonkey protocol survived exactly because of that decentralized instinct: kill Overnet the client and eMule and aMule kept the network breathing on their own.

~ the next chapter ~

The founder is the odd afterlife here. Jed McCaleb walked away from MetaMachine and spent the next decade on decentralized money, from the Mt. Gox exchange to the Stellar payment network. The man who wrote a serverless file-sharing client in 2002 kept chasing the same instinct in a different room. Overnet was the rough draft nobody remembers.

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other file sharing: Megaupload, ExtraTorrent, AnyHub, ShareConnector

also died in the 2000s: MobLogic, OzEmail, CATS

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