By Casey Muller
Scour.com was one of the peer-to-peer successors to Napster that
got
shut down for copyright infringement. Now it looks like the company
has been purchased by Centerspan, and will be reopened in some
incarnation or another.
The innovative thing about Scour was that it allowed the sharing
of
any type of media- music, movies, and images. At the height of its
use, it was easy to find full length motion pictures for download.
The
movies were encoded with DivX, a slightly altered version of an MPEG-4
codec that Microsoft put out. This codec allowed movies to be encoded
at the quite reasonable rate of about 10 megs per minute. Scour was
also a good way of finding images, because you could type in a keyword
and see related images that people in the network had shared.
Scour was one of the early victims of litigation in the new media
arena, and it fought a good battle. Scour became a distributor of
legal trailers and also promoted various films. This did not earn
it a
respite, and it eventually shut down. Now that it is under new
management, it will be interesting to see how things change.