Soribada
Encyclopedia
Soribada is the first Korean peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...
system. It started service in 2000. Soribada has been referred to as "the Korean Napster
Napster
Napster is an online music store and a Best Buy company. It was originally founded as a pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing Internet service that emphasized sharing audio files that were typically digitally encoded music as MP3 format files...
" 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
Korea
Korea ) is an East Asian geographic region that is currently divided into two separate sovereign states — North Korea and South Korea. Located on the Korean Peninsula, Korea is bordered by the People's Republic of China to the northwest, Russia to the northeast, and is separated from Japan to the...
. The most recent version of Soribada is Soribada 6, which is downloadable at their website.
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 wonSouth Korean won
The won is the currency of South Korea. A single won is divided into 100 jeon, the monetary subunit. The jeon is no longer used for everyday transactions, and appears only in foreign exchange rates...
are able to download MP3 tracks without Digital Rights Management
Digital rights management
Digital rights management is a class of access control technologies that are used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals with the intent to limit the use of digital content and devices after sale. DRM is any technology that inhibits uses of digital content that...
(DRM). Like iTunes
ITunes
iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....
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.