p2p news / p2pnet: With more than a million users, the biggest eDonkey/eMule server in the world, Razorback, was taken down this morning by the Belgian federal police. One administrator is reportedly under custody at the time of writing, as reported by Ratiatum.com.

We have very little information. The whole batch of Razorback servers were seized around 10am, French time, Belgian federal police.

Although the Razorback association has its headquarters in Switzerland, the core system was set up in Belgium. Razorback did not host any illicit content and was even participating very actively in the distribution of legal content such as Ratiatum’s download network (1 million+ P2P distributed freeware and shareware so far) and Jamendo’s free music.

The server used for eMule and eDonkey was, however, indexing millions of files swapped on P2P networks, and a large part of it was illicit. The main Razorback administrator said in the past he was willing to blacklist files reported to him by copyright holders, but no one replied the offer.

Razorback was participating in numerous legal projects, providing marketers with precious network usage statistics, and even by distributing DRM protected files for content providers.

But the disappearance of Razorback will change absolutely nothing to the millions of eMule users, who already benefit from an entirely decentralized network called "Kad".

Guillaume Champeau - Ratiatum

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 21st, 2006 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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