Morpheus put to sleep

Peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing software Morpheus was disconnected last week because parent company MusicCity failed to pay its bills.

The company's claims that hackers were responsible for the outage were cast under suspicion when Kazaa, which runs the FastTrack backbone network, said it had disconnected Morpheus for "failure to pay any amounts due to Kazaa BV under the parties' licence agreement".

As a result of Morpheus/MusiCity's breach of the agreement Kazaa did not provide version 1.5 of the client software to Morpheus, which would allow users to connect. "Kazaa has also terminated MusicCity's licence," the company said.

Morpheus had previously claimed - and still does - that it was victim of a dual hack attack which knocked out its servers and poisoned its client software making it a potential danger to the millions of end users.

Since the outage, Morpheus has dropped the FastTrack friendly client and moved over to a Gnutella-based platform instead.

Morpheus chief executive Steve Griffin said: "Since it appears that the attack on users' computers came from the closed proprietary FastTrack-Kazaa software, we have opted not to continue with this P2P kernel."

But whatever the reality behind Morpheus' problems, the friction between it and Kazaa, both of which share the same user base, offers a glimpse into the infighting that goes on in the P2P market.

However, Morpheus may yet be able to make a comeback. Since last week's release of the Gnutella-based Preview Edition of the software, figures show that it has been downloaded over 69 million times, whereas figures for Kazaa are still around 45 million.