In late 2006, Overnet and all Overnet-owned resources were taken down as a result of legal actions from the RIAA and others. Overnet implemented the Kademlia algorithm. Started as the Overnet project by Jed McCaleb, the creator of eDonkey2000 to overcome the need of servers. 'The eMule Protocol Specification' ( ) by Yoram Kulbak and Danny Bickson DANSS (Distributed Algorithms, Networking and Secure Systems) Lab - School of Computer Science and Engineering - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel - January 20, 2005, PDF document provided by the Emule Project. The eDonkey networks is centralized (as it depends on serves) to provide decentralized sharing of content (not stored on the servers), there are still many software implementations that support the network the most popular is eMule. On Septemusers could not get the eDonkey2000 client software, in SeptemMetaMachines settles for $30 Million (US) and the agreement closes any avenue MetaMachines had in dealing with any P2P technology in the future. In September 2005 the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sent several commercial P2P developer cease and desist letters including to MetaMachines and with no funds to battle the interpretation of the Supreme Court decision, Sam Yagan conceded defeat as he testified to the United States Senate Judiciary Committee. In June of 2005, the entertainment industry gained a victory in the Supreme Court (USA) that stated that every file-sharing developer could be sued for copyright infringement if they induced such behavior.

It had a stable P2P community and the protocol was older than BitTorrent it was created in 2002 shortly after the closing of Napster and competed with the FastTrack network. kad is in the open testing phase, eMule v0.EDonkey the original client for the eDonkey network (also known as eDonkey2000 network or eD2k), was created and managed by MetaMachines (Sam Yagan and Jed McCaleh) based on the city of new York.

eMule clients use multiple networks to create a single secure network (ED2K, Source Exchange, Kad)

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