Karma is a Boomerang (or More Proof That What Goes Around Comes Around)
P2P company sues RIAA over patent
source: http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5357332.html
Altnet, a company that sells music and other digital goods through file-swapping services, sued the Recording Industry Association of America on Wednesday for alleged patent infringement.
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In the summer of 2003, it announced that it had purchased patent rights to the process of identifying files on a peer-to-peer network using a "hash," or digital fingerprint based on the contents of the file.
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Altnet's lawsuit says that antipiracy companies Overpeer and MediaDefender are still on the hook, however. Overpeer is a "spoofing" company that posts millions of false or corrupted files on networks such as Kazaa, trying to make real files harder to find. Media Defender uses "interdiction" techniques, which essentially clog networks with requests that block real download efforts.
Both of these services use unauthorized versions of Kazaa and the underlying FastTrack peer-to-peer technology, and so are using Altnet's patent without permission, the company contends.