AfterDawn: Tech news

Korean alternative of Napster is in trouble

Written by Petteri Pyyny @ 15 Aug 2001 5:33

Extremely popular Korean song-swapping service, Soribada ("sea of sound"), is in deep trouble. Two South Korean brothers, Yang Jung-hwan and Yang Il-hwan, who built the application, are charged for copyright violations and might face up to 5 years in jail.
South Korea has extremely high percentage of people who have access to the Net and access to broadband connections -- country has over 20 million Internet users. Soribada was launched in last year and was an instant success. Guys claim that they just wanted to make "South Korea's version of Napster" -- and they succeeded to do that and also succeeded to get themselves in trouble as well.

RIAK (yeah, I know you guessed this one -- Recording Industry Association of Korea) which represents over 100 labels, claims that Soribada has caused labels to lose over $154 million in last year. Although their claims seem pretty weird as South Korea's album sales rised from $292 million in 1999 to $315 million in 2000.



Soribada's technology resembles the architecture of Gnutella and other modern P2P networks, meaning that it doesn't rely on any central server like Napster did -- and therefor the service is basically unstoppable even that they throw the creators in prison.

Previous Next  
Comments have been disabled for this article.

Latest news

Roomba Combo j7+ review - Clever trick allows robot vacuum finally to tackle home with rugs and carpets Roomba Combo j7+ review - Clever trick allows robot vacuum finally to tackle home with rugs and carpets (06 Jun 2023 9:19)
Roomba Combo j7+ is the very first Roomba model to combine robot vacuum with mopping features. And Roomba Combo j7+ does all that with a very clever trick, which tackles the problem with mopping and carpets. But is it any good? We found out.
Neato, the robot vacuum company, ends its operations Neato, the robot vacuum company, ends its operations (02 May 2023 3:38)
Neato Robotics has ceased its operations. American robot vacuum pioneer founded in 2005 has finally called it quits and company will cease its operations and sales. Only a skeleton crew will remain who will keep the servers running until 2028.
5 user comments
How to Send Messages to Yourself on WhatsApp How to Send Messages to Yourself on WhatsApp (20 Mar 2023 1:25)
The world's most popular messaging platform, Meta-owned WhatsApp has enabled sending messages to yourself. While at first, this might seem like an odd feature, it can be very useful in a lot of situations. ....
18 user comments
How to Enable Bluetooth on Stadia Controller How to Enable Bluetooth on Stadia Controller (11 Feb 2023 1:04)
Google shut down its streaming game service Stadia late last month and this means that some people have Stadia controllers lying around that seem to be of no use. That is fortunately not the ....
2 user comments
Guide: How to Kick Unwanted Guests from Your Netflix Account Guide: How to Kick Unwanted Guests from Your Netflix Account (26 Jan 2023 2:14)
Sharing a Netflix account with a person in a different location is possible and indeed very common, although the company doesn't necessarily enjoy this behavior from their customers. However, ....

News archive