Soribada

Soribada (Korean: 소리바다) is the first Korean peer-to-peer system. It started service in 2000. Soribada has been referred to as "the Korean Napster" and means "Ocean of Sound" or "Receiving(downloading) Sound"

Soribada was closed in 2002 by court order of Judge Kim Sun-Hye. After this, the program is still being distributed by Soribada, under the utility stipulations that they are not responsible for any of the files. After the trial, on November 5th, 2003, Soribada was reborn with the new name, (株) Soribada . On July, 2004, the Soribada website was renewed to become a P2P search portal. It also opened its paid MP3 service in December 2004. Now they have also released the programs Soribadaman, and Filebada.

Soribada is still the most widely-used P2P system in Korea. The most recent version of Soribada is Soribada 6, which is downloadable at their website.

Screenshot of Soribada3.

Charges of 2002

Soribada was indicted on copyright infringement charges for the first time.

Soribada 2.0

Soribada 2.0 allowed users to swap files without having to cross through a centralized server. This was made as a reply to the threat against prosecution. KAPP responded to this by suing the individual internet users themselves instead of the developers. Yang Jung-hwan responded to this approach by saying, “In a situation where voluminous e-mail services handling over 100MB are being sustained, netizens will find other ways to share music files even with Soribada out of the market.”

Paid service

From December 2004 to June 2005, Soribada sold nearly 5 million songs through its servers. Searches returned both tracks for sale and free downloads, with the first appearing higher on search results.

Service stopped: September 2005

Upon being sued again, Soribada stopped its service in 2005. Yang Jung-hwan and his brother Il-hwan, the creators of Soribada, faced criminal charges in January 2005. A complete shutdown of Soribada has been ordered by the Seoul High Court which ruled that the site has encouraged users to commit copyright violations.

Soribada 5 and 6

Soribada Inc. settled with record labels and copyright owners in early 2006, and it turned into a commercial music download service in July 2006. Soribada 5.0, now Soribada 6.0, is the third P2P service in the world that has become commercialised without hurting a P2P experience. Other such services include Monkey3 of Korea and imesh of the United States, respectively. Customers who pay the monthly fee of 7,000 won are able to download MP3 tracks without Digital Rights Management (DRM). Like iTunes and other popular online music stores, Soribada utilises audio fingerprint technology to identify the purchaser. Soribada claims that it covers around 90% tracks that have been released in Korea. As of January 2008, Soribada is the second largest music service provider in Korea with more than 700,000 paying subscribers.

External links

• Soribada
• Court orders Soribada to shut down its P2P service (2002)
• Court Blocks Free File-Sharing Services (2005)

References

• Soribada Headlines