iMesh

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

iMesh

Developed by iMesh.com
Latest release 7.2 / April 05, 2008
OS Windows
Genre Peer-to-peer
License Proprietary
Website iMesh.com

iMesh is a file sharing and online social network, available to download in 9 languages and uses a proprietary, centralized, P2P protocol. iMesh is owned by an American company iMesh, Inc. and maintains a development center in Israel.

iMesh was the first company to introduce "swarming" - the ability to download one file from multiple sources, increasing download speed, as well as a working 'resume' feature, allowing users to pause downloads and resume them at a later time. [1] [2][3]

The program offers free downloads of various music and video formats, with legal content offered by iMesh including music, video, Polyphonic or Truetone ringtones.

Contents

[edit] Legality of iMesh

[edit] RIAA Lawsuit

On September 18, 2003 the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) sued iMesh for encouraging copyright infringement. [4]

[edit] Settlement

iMesh settled the lawsuit a little over 10 months later on July 20, 2004, where according to the RIAA, the terms of the settlement were that iMesh would pay them US$4.1 million and could continue operating as normal (unlike Grokster) whilst implementing a paid service (iMesh 6.0). [5].

[edit] Legality

iMesh is now advertised as a 100% legal P2P client, and acknowledged as being so by the RIAA. [6]

The iMesh 6 client has achieved this by detecting attempts to download copyrighted material and blocking the transfer through the use of acoustic fingerprinting, provided by Audible Magic [7].

An agreement with the MPAA had also been reached. Video files more than 50mb in size and 15 minutes in length cannot be shared on the iMesh network, guaranteeing feature-length releases cannot be transferred across the network. [8]


[edit] Time line of major releases:

  • November 24, 1999, a pre-beta 1.02 was released.
  • December 26, 1999, a beta version 1.02 was released which features instant messaging between users, a new skin and anti-virus scanning.




  • October 25, 2005, iMesh revealed the first RIAA-approved P2P service (iMesh 6), which allows users residing in America and Canada to listen to music of their choice from a large library for a monthly fee. iMesh users can permanently purchase tracks for $0.99 each. In addition to the paid library, iMesh 6 allows users to access large amounts of "non-copyrighted" music and video files, free of charge.
  • The release of iMesh 7.0 added social networking features, instant messaging, an improved user interface and greater stability to the client.
  • April 11, 2007, iMesh 7.1 was released.
  • April 05, 2008, iMesh 7.2 was released.


[edit] External links

[edit] References