If you visit the Grokster.com website, this is the message you receive:

The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal. Copying copyrighted motion picture and music files using unauthorized peer-to-peer services is illegal and is prosecuted by copyright owners. There are legal services for downloading music and movies. This service is not one of them. Grokster hopes to have a safe and legal service available soon.

When you consider the criminal trials in other countries and the recent lawsuit that was filed against a 67-year old grandfather whose youngster downloaded several movies using a file sharing program and caught the ire of the Motion Picture Association of America, it's evident to see that this particular type of activity isn't being tolerated.

Grokster, which was known for its Peer-To-Peer (P2P) file sharing service, according to the Associated Press, closed down their operations on November 7th. The discontinuation of service was part of the settlement to satisfy a piracy case that had been filed by the music industry and several Hollywood interests.

What's being billed as THE NEW GROKSTER 3G was also announced on the company's site is in the process of being formed and likely programmed and should likely offer many of the same services while paying royalties to the copyright owners of the materials. Sounds like the same thing that happened to Napster!

About The Author:

Dan Robins is the webmaster of CRNH.COM, Computer Reviews News and Hardware, an online RSS news aggregator that offers thousand of computer related news stories.