eDonkey2000 Settles and Shuts Down

MetaMachine, Inc. has agreed to pay $30 million in settlement to avoid further lawsuits from the industry. The eDonkey website was replaced with an anti-piracy message, but as of now, the site seems to be completely offline. RIAA calls this another domino fall on its way to completely eliminating illegal file sharing facilities over the Internet, but in reality the termination of eDonkey means absolutely nothing to the community.

The eDonkey protocol was released a long time ago and since then, several third party clients have been developed with better features and stability. Even third party servers have been running for a long time. These third party clients connect to these third party servers essentially creating a sort of decentralized P2P network that remains completely unaffected with the shut down of eDonkey 2000. Besides, it’s not like the original eDonkey2000 client was very popular with the network userbase anyway.