On the heels of last week's Napster settlement, another file sharing developer has settled with the RIAA: MetaMachine, which includes eDonkey, eDonkey 2000, and the Overnet network, settled for $30 million. eDonkey2000.com is now offline.
However, eMule (originally developed as an open-source eDonkey clone) is still alive and kicking, so to speak, so users looking for a sure-footed P2P client for scaling mountains of music still have a pack-animal-themed option (eMule accesses a number of P2P networks simultaneously).
According to the Associated Press, MetaMachine also has to take measures to prevent eDonkey software from continuing to work as part of the settlement, although the extent of eDonkey's liability there is unclear. When the original Napster was taken down, open-source developers reverse-engineered Napster's servers so that Napster's client software would continue to work, and I don't remember Napster catching additional flak for that.
As an aside, I was subsequently barred (not by Wired) from writing a tutorial on how to point your Napster client to those OpenNap servers... but that's a whole different ball of wax. For now, the URL former eDonkey users need to know is emule-project.net.
