Some history lessons:
eMule Wiki
"The eMule project was started on May 13, 2002 by s (also known as Merkur) who was dissatisfied with the original eDonkey2000 client. Over time more developers joined the effort. The source was first released at version 0.02 and published on SourceForge on July 6, 2002. eMule was first released as a binary on August 4, 2002 at version 0.05a. The 'Credit System' was implemented for the first time on September 14, 2002 in version 0.19a. The eMule project website started up on December 8, 2002. Since its inception, eMule has been downloaded over 420 million times as of August 5, 2008 making it by far the most downloaded project on SourceForge.[1] Current versions (v0.40+) of eMule have added support for the Kad network. This network has an implementation of the Kademlia protocol, which does not rely on central servers as the eDonkey network does, but is an implementation of a distributed hash table. Also added in recent versions were the ability to search using unicode, allowing for searches for files in non-Latin alphabets, and the ability to search servers for files with complete sources of unfinished files on the eDonkey network. In new versions, a "Bad source list" was added. The application adds an IP address to this list after one unsuccessful connection. After adding an IP to the "Bad source list", the application treats this IP as a "dead" IP. Unavailable IPs are banned for a time period from 15 to 45 minutes. Some users have complained that it leads to a loss of active sources and subsequently slows download speed. Other recent additions include: the ability to run eMule from a user account with limited privileges (thus enhancing security), and intelligent corruption handling (so that a corrupted chunk does not need to be re-downloaded entirely). The 0.46b version added the creation and management of "eMule collection" files, which contain a set of links to files intended to be downloaded as a set. Recently, many ISPs are bandwidth throttling default P2P ports resulting in slow performances. The 0.47b version adds protocol obfuscation; eMule will automatically select two ports at random in the startup wizard. eMule is now considered a stable product, and new versions are not released as often as they used to be; five to six months is now a typical time interval between releases. The latest version is 0.49c which was released in February 2009."Kazaa WikiKazaa and FastTrack were created by Niklas Zennström, Janus Friis, and Priit Kasesalu (all of whom were later to create Skype and later still Joost). It was introduced by their Dutch company Consumer Empowerment in March 2001, near the end of the first generation of P2P networks typified by the shutdown of Napster in July 2001.
Initially, most users of Kazaa were users of the Morpheus program, formerly a client of MusicCity. But once the official Kazaa client became more widespread, its developers used their ability to automatically update it, changing the protocol in February 2002 to shut out Morpheus clients when its developers failed to pay license fees. Morpheus later became a client of the Gnutella network.
Consumer Empowerment was sued in the Netherlands in 2001 by the Dutch music publishing body, Buma/Stemra. In November 2001, the court ordered Kazaa's owners to take steps to prevent its users from violating copyrights or else pay a heavy fine. Consumer Empowerment responded by selling the Kazaa application to a complicated mesh of offshore companies, primarily Sharman Networks, headquartered in Australia and incorporated in Vanuatu. In late March 2002, a Dutch court of appeal reversed an earlier judgment and stated that Kazaa was not responsible for the actions of its users. Buma/Stemra lost its appeal before the Dutch Supreme Court in December 2003.
In 2003, Kazaa signed a deal with Altnet and Streamwaves to try to convert users to paying, legal customers. Searchers on Kazaa were offered a free 30 second sample of songs for which they were searching for and directing them to signup for the full featured Streamwaves service.[1]
But eMule can give access to old files gone in public domain, to user's files like tons that are on the network (images, mp3, videos) and to many other interesting stuff.
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