Scour

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

~ the eulogy ~

the file-sharing that reached me was napster, and later kazaa and dc++ at the internet cafe. not scour. in 1999 i was a teenager in turkey on a 33.6k modem, and pulling a single mp3 down over that line was already an act of patience. scour was a california thing, a ucla thing, and it came and went so fast that most people who traded files a couple years later never learned the name.

scour started in december 1997 as a multimedia search engine, built by five students out of the ucla computer science department. the search part crawled the web for audio and video. the part that mattered was scour exchange, a peer-to-peer network that let people share those files directly with each other, which puts it right at the front of the p2p wave alongside napster rather than behind it.

for a stretch around 1999 and 2000 it had real momentum and real backers. it was one of the first services to make searching for and grabbing media off other people's machines feel easy, before the word napster meant anything to anyone.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

scour's whole idea was to treat the internet as one big library of media you could search across. audio and video, all indexed and findable, and then shareable through the exchange. back then that was close to radical, because most of the web was still text and links and the media was scattered and hard to locate. scour tried to be the thing that found it for you.

the problem was the same one napster hit. almost everything worth finding was copyrighted, and a tool that made it trivial to copy was going to draw the industry's full attention. it did.

~ the actual end ~

in the summer of 2000 the motion picture association and the recording industry came after scour together, with the music publishers behind them, alleging copyright infringement on a scale that carried statutory damages large enough to end the company several times over. scour argued it was a search tool, not the infringer. it did not matter. no investor was going to put money into a company under that kind of suit.

scour laid off most of its people in september 2000 and filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy on october 13, with a mountain of debt and almost nothing on the other side of the ledger. a company called centerspan bought the assets out of bankruptcy that december and tried a licensed, legal version, which went nowhere.

~ the funny part ~

one of scour's early people was travis kalanick, who dropped out of ucla to work on it and rode it into the ground. he went on from the wreckage to co-found a file-sharing company called red swoosh, and then, years after that, uber. so the first big lawsuit of the p2p era did not just kill an early file-sharing site. it also launched a career that reshaped how a lot of the world gets a ride, which is not where you would have guessed a 2000 copyright case would lead.

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